


watchtower

by howimetyourmulder (skuls)



Series: the ones who stayed in derry [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, During the 27 Years (IT), Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, F/M, M/M, Stanley Uris Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 65,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22427998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/howimetyourmulder
Summary: Six times where it isn't Mike who stays behind in Derry to call everyone back; times where a different Loser stays behind and doesn't forget.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: the ones who stayed in derry [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608991
Comments: 45
Kudos: 147





	1. BILL

**Author's Note:**

> this idea is meant to serve as a companion to the lighthouse keeper. (although it is not necessary to read lighthouse keeper before reading this one, several plot points coincide or are shifted in these AUs to match those.) this idea came to me at like 2 a.m. when i was half asleep and went "what if the other Losers stayed in derry?" so i had to write it then, of course. 
> 
> this was originally supposed to be a long one shot, but it's getting entirely too long for my own good. (it's already like 20k and i'm still in the third part.) so i decided to post in parts. this part is about the least shippy of all the parts, and doesnt really feature any other characters besides bill and mike, but the other characters/ships will appear more heavily in the rest of the fic. 
> 
> these are essentially six different aus where a different loser stays instead of mike. they're meant to be more of character study things than a rewrite of chapter 2, and i've tried to make the timelines varying so these dont get monotonous, but they all take place in universes where stan and eddie live. honestly, i could've wrote a novel about any of these scenarios, and am trying to self contain before i have a monster on my hand lol. i'm gonna try to keep updates pretty regular, and i'm having fun exploring the different scenarios with the different losers staying.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill hugs Mike goodbye at the door, and by the time he's gotten to his car, he's decided. He's not leaving.

> _There must be some kind of way outta here_
> 
> _Said the joker to the thief_
> 
> _There's too much confusion_
> 
> _I can't get no relief_
> 
> _— "All Along The Watchtower," Bob Dylan_

_\---_

When Bill was a kid and his family used to go on vacations, Georgie would get wildly homesick by the third day, at least. Some times would be better than others—he enjoyed the beach and their grandmother's house, but was pretty miserable on long car trips—but by the end of the trip, he'd almost always fall into begging their parents, _Can we go_ home _yet?_ (His parents had thought it was sweet or funny, normally; they still thought things like that were, back then.) Georgie had loved Derry in a way that Bill had never understood, and probably never _will_ understand. Once, when he was five, he'd told Bill, _When I grow up, I'm staying here forever._ (Bill had replied, _Are you n-n-nuts? This place sucks, I can't wait to get out of it._ At the time, he and Eddie and Stan and Richie were forming elaborate plans to run away on a bus to Canada; he thinks even now that they probably would've done it if their allowance would've gotten them very far. Georgie had made a face when he said that, sticking out his tongue and bugging out his eyes and said, _You're crazy, Billy_.)

Georgie had never wanted to leave the town they'd grown up in, and Bill couldn't wait to get as far away as possible. Later, he thinks that in some way, they sort of got their wishes: Bill starts spending seventy-five percent of his time in Brunswick, Maine when he's sixteen, and Georgie will never leave Derry. But in another way, they've been denied it; Georgie will never grow up, and Bill ends up moving back to Derry when he is twenty-four. It all seems to come full circle. 

\---

Bill starts forgetting Derry, _really_ forgetting, when he leaves for college. His memory had gone foggy in ways he couldn't explain, or really even notice, as soon as he and his mom moved, but he had phone calls from the other Losers, and summer and holiday visits with his dad to keep him tethered. It all starts fading after that last summer, though; he spends his summer between graduation and college in Derry, and then he drives back to Brunswick to pack and catch a plane, and he has forgotten everything by the time he reaches his college in Indiana. He doesn't even realize he's lost anything. Maybe because he still has a good chunk of high school—his time in Brunswick with his mom, and the friends he made there. Or maybe that's just how the memory loss works. Bill can never be completely sure. He doesn't think about it much between Indiana and Derry, because he doesn't know that there's anything to think about. 

(The only moment that really sticks out to him is during the first Christmas vacation after he leaves for college. He's back in Brunswick, preferring to spend the holiday with his mom instead of his dad, and he gets a call from a guy named Mike who seems to think Bill knows who he is. Bill has absolutely no idea and tells him so, which leads to the guy abruptly hanging up. It shouldn't be too weird, or even something he thinks about too much—it's probably just someone from school he doesn't recognize—but he keeps returning to it in the days following, his mind lingering over it again and again, even months after it's all over. It makes him think that maybe, _maybe_ the guy wasn't full of it when he acted like Bill should've known him. Bill muddles over it and muddles over it, but he just can't place any Mike, so he tries to forget it. And for years afterwards, he succeeds.)

The strangest part, probably, about his lapse in memory is Georgie. Bill doesn't forget _him,_ exactly, but he forgets most of what he knows about him. He can say, _I had a little brother, he died when I was a kid,_ when people ask if he has any siblings, but he can't bring up specific memories and he can't remember how Georgie died. It isn't too strange, at first—Bill and his parents have an unspoken agreement not to talk about Georgie, so it rarely comes up—but eventually, people start asking how his brother died and Bill can't answer the questions. He can look at old family pictures and point out who Georgie is—the gap-toothed little kid who he's got his arm around, beaming into the camera every time—but that's about it. And Bill never even thinks it's strange. 

It all comes out in his writing, in ways he can't even place until years later. He writes short stories that he submits to magazines about deaths in the family and monsters in the woods and tight-knit childhood friends hanging out in the crumbling facade of their hometown. A psychologist could pick it to shreds. He writes like crazy from the moment he enters college, impressing professors and fellow students. He gets plenty of compliments, is told he has a talent, a way with words; the only thing people consistently complain about is his endings. His stories are all dark, cloaked in layers of death and darkness and violence and grief. The friends grow apart, the family shatters, the monsters kill everybody. _Your stories would be great, Billy,_ one friend tells him, _if they didn't bum me the fuck out._

Bill moves to St. Louis after he finishes his Bachelor's, but it's pretty miserable. He's still mostly a freelance writer, part-time jobs aside, and he lives in a tiny apartment with two roommates, and he never has any money. He flies out to see his mother on holidays, either to Maine or to relatives in another part of the country, and he talks to his father on the phone an average of three times a year, and he works all day and writes long into the night, feverishly. He gets a scrappy little cat from the shelter, all black with a patch of white on one eye. He starts a novel, a horror novel: a huge, decaying Victorian mansion, a crumbling family, a bereaved mother teetering on insanity. A murdered son. Mysterious footprints in the attic upstairs. And he lies out his ass when his mom asks what he's working on. And he still doesn't remember, despite the memories he's spilling out on the page like blood. Despite the nightmares that he has that leave him in tears. He doesn't remember until he's twenty-four, when he goes back to Derry to visit his father for Christmas. 

It's not something Bill _wants_ to go to—he and his father are far from close, haven't been close since he was at least twelve. But his father's been asking by way of passive aggressive emails for years when Bill is going to come see him, and he feels as if he can't refuse anymore. So he packs up his shitty little car, stows his cat in a carrier (mostly because he can't afford a flight or a kennel, and his roommates are also out of town), and drives from St. Louis to Derry over two long, cold days. (He spends half the drive dictating plot points into a recorder—he's trying to settle on an ending for his novel.) 

Bill's mind starts going foggy on the second day, muddled and confused and landing on strange, unfinished thoughts that he can't explain, but he doesn't really think much of it. Not until he sees the sign— _WELCOME TO DERRY_ —and feels a sharp spike through his brain, exploding painfully behind his eyes. Until he has to pull sharply off the road and bend nearly in half, breathing hard, his eyes half shut as tears well up. He doesn't even realize it but he's whispering under his breath—he's chanting, "Nonononononono," in a small, tight voice, a hand clenched in his hair. 

He's _remembering_ . His friends' names and faces are filling his head suddenly—Stan, Eddie, Richie, Ben, Bev, Mike—fuck, fuck, the call was _real_ . He's remembering and having no idea how he could've forgotten—Eddie and Richie and Stan have been his best friends since kindergarten, and Bev and Ben and Mike were… They were the Losers Club, they were there for each other when no one else was, they were each other's _family_ , and he'd _forgotten_ that. They'd—they'd made a promise, and Bill can't remember the promise, but he's rubbing a thumb absently over this weird, silvery scar on his palm. Something had happened in 1989, something that makes him shiver all over, his teeth chattering even though he has the best all the way up. Something happened after— _Georgie._

And Bill really is crying now, his face in his hands. Georgie had died violently, Georgie had been killed. Blood all over the streets, washed away by the rain. He'd made Georgie a paper boat. He'd let him go out to play alone because he hadn't wanted to play, and he'd never seen him again. 

Bill sobs on the side of the road, just over the town line, until he can barely breathe anymore and his eyes sting like crazy. He can't think, can't move, until he hears his cat meowing from the backseat. Bill wipes his eyes and looks back to see him pawing at the bars of his carrier like a desperate prisoner. 

Bill laughs, tearily, and reaches back to grab him. He calls the cat Stoker, a result of his junior year obsession with _Dracula,_ and sometimes he feels like the only family Bill has left. 

Except he's _not_. Because even though Georgie is gone and his parents are distant, the Losers are still out there somewhere. And if he's remembering right, Mike never left Derry. Mike might still be here somewhere. 

"Shit, buddy," Bill says, wiping his eyes and petting the top of Stoker's head. Stoker meows and licks the inside of his wrist, curling up lazily in his lap. "What the fuck am I going to do now?"

\---

Bill manages to get to his dad's within the next hour, despite the prevailing headache and the constant slam of memories that bombard him every time he passes something familiar. (It's not exactly easy to drive when he gets about eighteen years of forgotten memories every time he passes a familiar landmark. He may have the years in Brunswick bookending his childhood, but he spent all his summers here anyway.) He knows better to ask his dad about any of it—the closest he gets is when his dad hugs him at the door and sees he's been crying, and asks why. Bill explains, "J-j-j-just remembering Georgie." His dad's face clenches in pain or anger or both, and Bill shivers at his own words—he hasn't stuttered in years. 

He can't focus during dinner, continues lingering over the new memories crowding his mind. He throws out the names of the friends he remembers to see what his dad knows. His dad doesn't seem to remember Ben or Mike very much at all—that tracks, that's about when he checked out, when Bill started bringing them around. But he remembers Richie and Stan and Eddie, of course. "Those kids practically lived over here when you were in elementary school," he says. "And I still talk to the Toziers sometimes." He remembers Bev, too—"Your first little girlfriend, I remember. You talked to her on the phone all the time, clogged up the line damn near every night." (Bill remembers that. He started calling Bev all the time at night because he was tired of fighting for the phone when they all called together.) 

Bill kind of changes the subject after that, but he departs to his dad's office right after dinner. He used to sneak in here all the time as a kid, digging through his dad's maps and trying to find Georgie. (He remembers that in a flash, while he’s digging through his dad's desk in search of a phone book as Stoker weaves between his legs, meowing impatiently.) He finds Mike's number and calls him, sitting on the lumpy couch he and Georgie used to hide behind when they played hide and seek. 

Mike Hanlon. He lived out on that farm, where they used to hang out, used to work during the summers. That's where they spent the last night before he and Richie left for college. They'd spent all night talking and looking at the stars. Bill had told them that they'd still be friends even after they left, because they'd promised… something. He hadn't known he'd forget. He half-shuts his eyes in memory, listening to the rings drone on until Mike answers on the other end. "Hanlon residence, Mike speaking."

"Mikey," Bill says, mostly in an exhale. "Jesus Christ. It's… It's Bill. Bill Denbrough." He chews his lower lip, wincing when blood rises to the surface. "I'm back in town. I… I remember. I don't know why I ever forgot."

There's a pause on the other end, long enough to make Bill worry he's made a mistake. He strokes Stoker rhythmically, waiting for Mike to speak. His eyes jerk nervously and land on a photo of him and Georgie on Halloween, dressed as Batman and Robin. 

"Shit," Mike says. "Holy shit, Bill, can I buy you a drink?"

\---

They don't go to a bar. They end up at a dime they used to hang out at. Bill remembers it from midway through their sophomore year—they'd come here to study when the library closed, they'd spend summer nights here after they went to the movies or something like that. He thinks the others spent way more time here than he ever did, after he moved away, but he still remembers jamming in here with everyone during the summers he spent with his dad, ordering breakfast and coffee to cure hangovers or chugging milkshakes on the hottest days of the year.

(He remembers it all gradually on the way to the diner, starting where he passes the sewer grate where Georgie's life ended and ending when he gets to the diner. He spends a few long minutes in the car, trying to stop crying, before going in to meet Mike. A clown. A horrible, demonic clown killed his brother, and tried to kill them, and they tried to kill it so It would stop. But somehow he doesn't think that Its dead. And It is supposed to come back twenty-seven years later.)

Mike hugs him as soon as he gets in the door, a tight relieved hug, and Bill immediately apologizes for the phone call. "I'm s-so sorry, Mike, I-I don't know what came over me…"

"It's okay," Mike says evenly as they sit, smiling a little. "You didn't remember." He shoots Bill a gently questioning look across the table. "How much do you remember now?"

Bill sighs, leaning his forehead into the palms of his hands. He feels like crying all over again. "I… I remember everything."

Mike fills him in on what's happened since he left. Everyone forgot, he says; it's not just him. No one's come back except Ben and Stan; Stan really just came to Bangor, where his parents moved, and he apparently didn't remember Mike even when Mike told him who he was; Mike only saw Ben briefly and didn't talk to him, but he suspects Ben's forgotten, too. "You and Stan were my confirmation," he says. "Bev, too. I remembered how weird and foggy you two got after you moved, especially Bev. That's when I knew what was going on, when I pieced together all of those weird interactions. Bev stopped calling after a couple years, remember?"

"You think it's the clown?" Bill asks. 

"I definitely think it's the clown," says Mike grimly, wincing as he does it. "I definitely do. What the hell else could it be?"

Mike, who stayed because his grandfather was sick, is staying now out of necessity. "My grandmother keeps telling me I should go, now, but I've pretty much decided I have to stay," he says. "I start forgetting once I'm out of the town limits for longer than a day. And someone needs to stay and remember."

"Shit," says Bill, his head falling forward into his hands. "Shit, Mike, I—I had no idea I'd even forgotten. I didn't _want_ to forget, and I didn't know I was doing it… I w-would kind of realize it sometimes when I'd come home from Brunswick, but then I'd just forget again… I didn't want to forget, though." He touches the scar on his palm and hears himself on that last night, saying, _This promise connects us. We're not gonna lose each other._ At the time, he'd really believed that; he really, really had.

"I _don't_ want to forget," he adds firmly, his voice rising in fear. "I don't want to forget again… Fuck, Mikey, I forgot how Georgie died. I forgot…" And then he is crying again, in the diner, wiping his face with the scratchy napkins. He doesn't, he doesn't want to forget, he's only had the memories back for a few hours but he doesn't want to forget, ever again. It feels like a betrayal to forget, a betrayal of his brother, who died because of him; a betrayal of his friends, who nearly died for him, who fought off a demon clown for him because they wouldn't leave him alone to die. He can't do it again. He can't do it to them again.

Mike comes around the booth and wraps an arm around his shoulder, just letting him cry it out. He changes the subject when Bill is done, asks about college, asks about his mom, asks if he's still writing. They talk for a couple hours about everything but the clown—about Stoker and St. Louis and his novel, about Derry and Mike's grandparents and his own college, about growing up in Derry. About his friends, who Bill hadn't realized how much he's missed until this moment. Mike hasn't spoken to any of them since they left, he says, but he remembers them as fondly as Bill does, and it's probably the best part of the night, the two of them swapping stories and remembering their friends. 

Bill hugs Mike goodbye at the door, and by the time he's gotten to his car, he's decided. He's not leaving. The last thing he wants to do is stay in this town, but his desire not to forget is stronger than that. He won't forget, not again. And besides, if Mike is only staying so he can call everyone back when the time comes, then there is no reason Bill shouldn't take his place. This has always been his crusade; it became all of theirs, but he was the one who started it. It's his turn to fall on the knife. 

\---

Bill brings it up to Mike a couple days after Christmas, when they actually go get a drink at a bar Mike heavily recommends. They kind of avoid the subject of the clown until they cannot anymore, until it has to come up. Mike tries to reassure Bill, says, "Bill, y-you don't need to worry, okay? About forgetting. I… I know it's a difficult thing to grapple with, but you don't need to worry. I'm here, and I'm gonna take care of it, and I'll call you all back when the time comes, remind you of everything. I promise."

"Mike, no," Bill says immediately. "Y-you don't need to do that." He holds up one hand when Mike starts to protest. "S-seriously, you don't need to. I'm going to stay. It’s decided. I’m already looking at apartments."

"Come on, Bill, you don't need to do that. You've got a life outside of here!" says Mike. "You've got something to go home to. I'm _already_ home."

"There's not much in St. Louis for me," Bill says simply, because there isn't. "I want to write, and I can do t-that from anywhere. And besides… I don't want to forget. Not again. Not you guys, and not Georgie. I _can't_ do that again." Mike looks ready to protest again, so Bill adds, "I was the one who dragged you into all of this, anyway. I almost got you all _killed_ , and you all promised to come back anyway. I can't let you sacrifice y-your future for my cause, not when you've already sacrificed so much. It's my responsibility to take care of it now."

Mike laughs a little, running a hand over his face. "You haven't changed at all," he says. "You're not gonna change your mind on this, are you?"

"No," Bill says, laughing a little, too. "But I'm not going to talk you into leaving, either. You should stay, if you want. It might be nice to have some company. This t-town doesn't seem to be getting any bigger."

Mike laughs again, louder this time. "I can vouch for that. It gets pretty lonely here, Big Bill." He takes a swig of beer, pulling at the label absently. "I… I don't know," he adds thoughtfully. "I'm gonna have to talk to my grandmother. I won't leave her here, but I get the feeling she might want to leave, too—I mean, this is the place where her husband and son died. I don't know if it's really even home for her, anymore. And I… I need to stay with her, after everything she's done for me. Do what she wants to do."

"You do what you want to, Mikey," Bill says, reaching out to clap his shoulder. "I can't say I'd mind if you stayed. The company would be nice. But I remember you wanted to leave as a kid, and you still deserve that. It might be nice to forget for a while." And Mike smiles, just a little, at that.

Mike hugs him at the end of the night and tells Bill that he's glad he's staying, that if Mike himself ends up staying, it'll be nice to have the company. Three months later, he and his grandmother leave so she can retire on the coast of South Carolina. Bill helps them pack up, bids them goodbye, tells Mike to keep in touch if he somehow remembers. "I'll see you in 2016," he adds, low in Mike's ear so his grandmother won't hear, and waves goodbye when the truck pulls away. 

Bill feels strange those entire first few months, but he doesn't really feel alone until Mike leaves. That's the moment it sort of hits him, that all his friends are gone.

\---

Bill spends a couple months with his dad while he looks for an apartment, and it's extraordinarily strange being in his old home again. By the time Bill and his mother had moved, it hadn't even felt like home anymore, and it still doesn't, really; it feels like an echo of his childhood, haunted by the ghosts of who they used to be. Here's the piano his mother used to play; here's the coffee table where they played board games; here's the dining room table where they'd sat and laughed when they were a happy family. Here's the TV where he and Richie and Stan and Eddie watched Saturday morning cartoons after sleepovers, tearing into boxes of Pop-Tarts and Lucky Charms and Coco Puffs. Here's the attic where they played hide and seek, and once lost a four-year-old Georgie when Richie suggested he hide in a secret closet that none of the Denbroughs had known about. Here's his old room, here's the rug where Georgie would sleep when he had nightmares (curled into a ball, sucking his thumb). Here's Georgie's room, unchanged as the rest of the house, door shut as tightly as it has been ever since Georgie died. (His parents had kept it closed religiously, had screamed at Bill for trying to go in or touch anything. Bill rebelliously flings it open the day he moves out, walks in and looks around and touches all his brother’s old things, sits down on the floor and cries like a baby. One last moment of rebellion before he leaves this place forever.) Bill's life feels entirely populated by ghosts. It doesn’t really even change when he moves out because the town is still the same, the streets are still the same. (The elementary school where they’d had a vigil for Georgie, populated by teary little kids and frantic parents and teachers. The park where he’d sat with his friends and talked about the clown. The playground where he and the guys went after school every single week in elementary school. The quarry where they used to swim. The arcade, the Barrens, the clubhouse, the middle school where Bowers had made their lives a living hell. Every single place that he knows they found a missing kid, he remembers. The house on Neibolt.)

It's not entirely horrible. He has Stoker, and he has a temp job at his dad's office, and he's writing more than he's written in years, bent over a desk in his small, drafty apartment. Maybe it's the return of his memories, or maybe it's just the stunning quiet of the Derry streets compared to St. Louis, but Bill is writing faster than ever before, in a feverish madness. He finishes his novel, even though he painfully realizes that it's pretty transparently about Georgie and his mom. He doesn't change his original ending, either, tempting as it is. He finishes the novel and begins revisions and submits it to publishers at the end of 2001. By 2002, he's gotten an acceptance from one, who seems to want him for a three book contract. They push him, gently, to do a sequel to _The Attic Room_ and he refuses. He starts a different one instead. 

Bill emails Mike a few times after he leaves Derry, but he only hears back once. He kind of expects it, but it's still a little disappointing. He spends the next couple years emailing or trying to call the others, but it doesn't really go anywhere. They don't remember, of course. He gets an idea of where they all are, though, and a few more searches reveal what they're all doing with their lives. It's strange to hear things about who they all are now, even if it's just text on a screen. He can picture them all as he last saw them when they were all eighteen, or as he saw them that summer; he hasn't seen Bev _since_ that summer, since the morning that they'd gone to the Town House to tell her goodbye before she left Portland. That was the only summer they all had together, since Bev left; they hadn't known Ben or Mike before that summer, and although Bev had been in school with them since kindergarten, they'd never really hung out before then. It may have been a summer spent chasing a clown that almost killed them all, but it was still a good summer despite it all. Bill finds boxes of old stuff they'd saved from when they were kids in his old bedroom and spends a few hours going through everything when he first moved in, smiling absently over their blocky kid handwriting and their goofy faces in photographs. 

He finds the town pretty unchanged. The adults are still foggy, and the aura is still pretty creepy. Bill ends up spending more time prowling around the town and reading Derry history. When Mike had left, he'd given Bill the research that he'd been collecting on Derry and Pennywise, beginning with the project he and Ben had started in high school and ending more recently. Bill spends time combing through it himself, looking for any sort of answers on how to kill the damn thing when the time comes. He doesn’t find much. He finds a ritual that might be worth a try, but that's about it. He puts it aside because it’ll probably work better than beating the shit out of the stupid thing and hoping it starves, because _that_ clearly did jack shit. 

At times (when he’s waking up from nightmares at three in the morning, shaking and calling Georgie’s name like he’s thirteen all over again; when he’s remembering the way his friends looked in that cavern, hollow and small and dirty and bruised and _scared_ ), Bill is tempted not to call them back. To kill this thing on his own and let that be the end of it. It begins and ends with him. 

But his hand usually starts stinging like crazy when he thinks about that, a sharp pain that usually makes him yowl out loud and stop that line of thinking immediately. It actually creeps him the fuck out, makes him wonder if it’s the stupid clown that wants them all to come back and be together again, more than he or Mike ever did. (That doesn’t help with the issue of not wanting to call them back.) But the stinging brings him back to reality, staring at his hand and remembering how he’d cut it, how he’d cut all of their hands and made them swear. It feels a little extreme now, maybe even a little stupid, but it hadn’t then. He’d done it because he had really believed they would be stronger together, that they could defeat it if they worked together, and strange as it is, Bill still believes that, even now. They have to do it together, or they'll lose.

So he always talks himself out of not calling them all back. It still seems like the best thing to do. And besides, he misses them all. He really, really misses them. Being back in Derry makes it even worse; he’s surrounded by the places they used to go, reminders of the things they used to do. It’s everywhere, and the memories just keep coming, knocking him over with waves of nostalgia and sadness. It’s lonely, just like Mike said. It’s very lonely here.

Bill stays anyway. He stays and he writes, more horrifying novels too heavily based in his own life, and publishers eat it up. He walks through the streets where he’s been since he was a kid and tries not to see ghosts choking them from end to end. He remembers, because no one else can. He chases the clown through books and ancient texts, and he emails his friends occasionally, and he never, ever hears back. 

\---

Shockingly enough, Bill finds success as a writer. It surprises him, mostly because despite the compliments from his creative writing friends, he's never had very much faith in his writing. But he supposes it's a good thing that his childhood trauma is marketable. He sells books as fast as he can write them, motivated by the success of _The Attic Room_ and his second novel. He writes until he can quit his day job, until he gets to the point where he can hole up all day and write like a madman, Stoker sprawling impatiently across his desk. He spends all his time writing and researching Derry history, because what the hell else is he gonna do? He feels a little out of his element, researching this history shit all the time—that was always Ben and Mike’s thing—but it feels necessary, so he does it. 

He watches as some of his friends, incredibly, get famous. It’s a surprise and not a surprise all at once, when he finds out that Richie’s a comedian and Ben’s an acclaimed architect and Bev’s running some fashion empire—Richie’s been like that since kindergarten, since he used to recite entire sequences of _Looney Tunes_ from memory (chewing on a stick and pretending it was a carrot till the teachers caught him), and Ben did build them that clubhouse, which is remarkably still standing, and Bev used to talk about clothes when they talked on the phone, had gotten into it after shopping with her aunt. Bill finds them through Google searches, absent attempts to try and keep up with them all (it looks like Mike’s in Arizona and Eddie’s in New York and Stan’s in Atlanta), and after that, it’s kind of hard not to keep up with them, to read the interviews with Ben and Beverly, to watch Richie’s specials and laugh even though it doesn’t really feel like him. (He suspects a ghost writer, because he knows that at least half of the stories Richie claims from his childhood never actually happened.) 

It’s strange when Bill remembers that his friends could probably find _him_ from a Google search, too, if they had any idea who he was. He’s tried to keep a relatively low profile, considering that he can’t leave Derry, but his books have taken off, and he’s obligated to do a few promotional things. He starts a website and joins the obligatory social media sites and sells the movie rights to _The Black Rapids_ (his most popular) when an agent calls. He won’t do book signings anywhere too far away to spend the night in Derry, tours are out of the question, and all his interviews either require someone to come to Bangor, or are just done over the phone or email. This is because once, in his early thirties, he accepts an offer to be on a talk show and flies out to New York, figuring one night away won’t be so bad. He ends up forgetting nearly everything—all the inspiration for his books, which is the main subject, he based the main characters of _The Black Rapids_ off of his friends who he forgets outside of Derry, for fuck’s sake—and stammers his way through the interview, bullshitting his way through every single answer. He flies back to Bangor two days later, rattled, and ends up a sobbing mess all over again when he crosses town lines, and since then, he refuses to leave. It’s his responsibility, he tells himself over and over again. He has to do it. For his friends, for Georgie, for all the kids he couldn’t save. And so he does. 

The movie version of _The Black Rapids_ is complete shit, by the way. There’s no theater in Derry anymore, so Bill has to drive to Bangor to watch it, and they got them all wrong, his warped little version of the Loser’s Club that everyone is probably gonna kill him for. They keep his ending, too, which he already knows is shit, but at least nobody dies. The only uplifting part of that is imagining making fun of it with the others when the time comes.

Bill wakes up in the middle of the night, on the tail end of a nightmare sometimes (Stan’s face covered in blood, or Eddie backed up against the wall with his shattered arm, screaming, or Mike fighting Bowers and losing, or Ben bleeding out from those scratches, or Richie taking his punch and tumblingyo the ground, or Bev floating in mid air, or Georgie, the real Georgie, not the clown, with Mike’s gun to his head) with his scar stinging like crazy. His friends’ names on the tip of his tongue. Sometimes he thinks he’s still back there in the sewers, leading them all into danger, yelling at them to run away. Sometimes he thinks he never left. 

But they didn’t leave him there. Bill always remembers that, in the aftermath of the nightmares, pressing his face into the pillow and rubbing the scar like it’s an old war wound, aching in the middle of the night. He told them to leave, in the cistern, and they _didn’t_. They could've saved themselves, but they didn’t leave. They stayed and they saved his life, and they defeated It and they did it together. Even if it wasn’t forever.

Sometimes Bill wonders if he can do this to them again. Bring them back, lead them into danger, let them get hurt again. (He’s so terrified that someone is going to get hurt again.) But he doesn’t have a choice. It has to be all of them ( _lucky seven_ ), and they have to do it together, and he doesn’t think he can do it without them. Not face the clown—he’d die if he did it alone, but he doesn’t think he’s scared of facing the clown by himself. He never has been. But he doesn’t think he could stand never seeing them again. His friends, who wouldn’t leave him alone in the sewers even though they probably should have. The Losers. Mike was right, it’s lonely as shit here, and he can’t stand it anymore. He misses them all so much.

\---

In January of 2016, Bill drives down to leave Stoker with his mom. Stoker’s getting up there in years, and he claims it’s because his mom is lonely, but really, he just doesn’t want Stoker to be there for this. He’s not letting It take his cat; he’s not letting It take anyone else, if he can help it. It’s extraordinarily lonely in Derry without Stoker, the best friend he’s had for fourteen years now, but Bill won’t risk it, no fucking way.

He tries to stop It. He tries to stop people from going missing and he fails, his agent’s on his ass about a new book and an adaptation of _The Attic Room_ and deadlines and interviews, and the police laugh at him at first when he calls, and then start telling him to fuck off. When the first couple kids disappear, Bill berates himself for not stopping it sooner, goes to the vigils, walks the streets of the town, goes to the Barrens and looks for them or for their bodies, and he never finds anything. He tries to stop it, tries to anticipate the attacks, but it never works, he is always, always not there at the right time. It gets to the point where he suspects that Pennywise is watching him, waiting until he gives up and goes to bed early, or decides to write or some shit like that, to take kids. He fucking hates it. He almost calls his friends five times before he gives up because he wants to be sure, he doesn’t want to bring them all back for nothing. He has to talk himself a million times out of doing it all alone. 

Bill doesn’t know it’s time until he has the dream. It’s one of the worst dreams of his life because it’s so _real_. It’s raining, raining so hard he can barely see, and he’s standing on his porch at his old house, looking out in the streets. And then Georgie comes barreling up the steps in his yellow rain slicker and barrels right into Bill, throwing his arms around him, paper boat in hand. Bill can actually feel the water from Georgie’s slicker soaking into his clothes. He’s crying before he knows it, leaning down to hug his brother, and he says, “Georgie.”

“It’s raining too hard, Billy,” Georgie says, hugging him hard. “You should come with me.”

“I can’t,” Bill says, even though that’s not what he’s supposed to say; he wants to say, _Yes, of course I’ll come with you, I’m not going to let anything happen to you, I love you so much, Georgie._

“You _have_ to,” Georgie says, pulling away to look at him. “We’re waiting for you, Billy. There’s a man floating under the bridge, I wanna show you. You and all your friends.”

That’s when Bill realizes that it’s not him, and he lets go of his brother and steps back. Georgie keeps his grip on his shirt, though, and his face still looks normal, and it _looks_ like him, loose tooth in the front, cowlick in his hair, huge, pleading eyes, oh Jesus Christ. “Come on, Bill,” he pleads. “I miss you. We both miss you, _all_ of you. And it’s time to come home.” 

Bill yanks out of his grip and turns away, turns towards the door and tries to run; he can still hear Georgie behind him screaming, “Come home! Come home, come home!” and he reaches for the door but it all crumbles away, crumbles into murky daylight and his bedroom and tears on his face. 

In the morning, Adrian Mellon is on the news, and Bill punches his kitchen cabinet so hard one knuckle starts bleeding. That’s how he knows it’s time. He has to call them back and he has to do it now. 

He has all of their numbers; he collected them all in January, so he would be ready when the time came. He gets a little emotional when he pulls the list out, looking at all their names, names he had somehow forgotten and stayed in Derry so he wouldn’t forget again. He’s glad he hasn’t forgotten, because he wants to remember, he wants to remember all of it. The playground games with Eddie and Richie and Stan, the summers in the quarry and the Barrens, the clubhouse Ben had built for them, the diner and the camping trips and the messy phone calls with Beverly. The night they’d driven down to see his graduation and went to the beach. The last night, where he had sworn they wouldn’t lose each other—and he still, after all this time, hopes they won’t. He’s missed them all so much. 

Bill calls Mike first, because it only seems right. This part of it started with him, he’s the one who told Bill everything, he’s the one who would have stayed. Bill dials his number, a little nervously, and listens to it ring, tapping his fingers frantically against his desk until he hears Mike pick up. “Mike Hanlon speaking.”

“Mikey, it’s Bill,” he says. “Bill Denbrough." He exhales slowly. His eyes lift to the picture of the seven of them he has pinned up above his desk, jumbled together on the banks of the creek in the Barrens, grinning into the camera. He bites back a nervous smile, just a little one, and takes another deep breath, staring into the faces of their thirteen-year-old selves. "It’s time to come back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is meant to resemble bill's plot in lighthouse keeper, where he leaves with his mom in the middle of high school but comes back to keep visiting his friends for the summers. stoker came from an offhand mention of a cat in lighthouse keeper when mike reads the dust jacket bio in bill's book. (i swear, the best part of writing bill is coming up with plots for his novels lol.)
> 
> hit me up on @how-I-met-your-mulder on tumblr


	2. BEN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He remembers as a child telling Bev, firmly, when she pointed out that It would come back, I'll be forty and far away from here. But here he is, forty and still in Derry, the town that has accidentally become his home.

It had rained when Ben had moved to Derry, way back in March of 1989. By thirteen, Ben had moved so many times that he didn’t really look forward to going anywhere new, but the rain definitely hadn’t helped. He can still remember that first drive through town, fidgeting anxiously in the passenger seat, face pressed against the cold glass as he looked out at the town. It had kind of a sad air around it, buildings flat and deflated, people walking with their heads down. Missing kid posters soaked wet and plastered to the telephone poles. (That had creeped Ben out, he remembers, just how _many_ there were. The ink had run and the kids always looked so sad and scared. Even when they were smiling in the pictures, they looked scared.) He had been uneasy about the town then, and decided about two weeks later that he definitely hated it there. The kids were mean and he ended up sitting alone every lunch period. No matter how bad it gone in the other towns, Ben had always had someone to sit with. But in Derry, he always sat on the end of a mostly empty table, eating the inedible cafeteria food and reading a book. Hiding behind it when people hurled insults at him like mashed potatoes in a food fight.

That was before he’d made friends, before he’d met the other Losers, and it had gotten better after that. Much better. (Evil clown aside.) But he always remembers those first couple months in Derry as horrible, as the insanely lonely months that made him hate the town so much that he silently hoped he and his mom would move again soon. He’d had no idea, then, that he’d end up spending the rest of his goddamn life in Derry, Maine.

Ben dreads 2016 with an absent sort of foreboding, as he probably should’ve expected. He’s been waiting for a long time, but it hasn’t gotten any easier. He’d hated the summer of 1989 as much as he loved it, had nightmares for months about heads in trees and smoking eggs, Henry Bowers and his knife, werewolf claws and blinding pain in his stomach, Stan’s face nearly eaten by the woman in the sewers, Bill grabbed by the clown, Bev floating in the air, her eyes blank… Even the introduction to the people who became his best friends didn't do much to take the edge off of the summer. (It helped a little, but it didn't do much to take the edge off. He thinks the others would agree with him; they were all terrified, too.) 

Ben's not exactly looking forward to the prospect of doing it all again. He remembers as a child telling Bev, firmly, when she pointed out that It would come back, _I'll be forty and far away from here._ But here he is, forty and still in Derry, the town that has accidentally become his home. He has to fight a clown again, and he has to call his friends back, and that's honestly scaring him nearly as much as the clown is. They’d all been close as teenagers, up until the point where they all left for college. They’d all seemed sad about leaving, then, had all looked a little lost, like they weren't sure what to do without each other, but things are different now. It’s been over two decades since they all left, and things have changed a lot. Aside from the fact that Bill, Richie, and Bev are all famous now, they’ve all grown into different people that Ben doesn't know anymore, and they’ve all forgotten each other. Ben knows that much for certain. And no matter how much he reminds himself of how good it was when they were all here, no matter how many times he’d gone through the mementos he’s collected, remembered everything that’s happened and how much they all cared about each other—there’s still that same little voice in his head telling him, _They don’t care about you anymore. They’re not your friends anymore. They’ve moved on, and they’re going to hate you for calling them back._

_I’ll be forty and far away from here._ What a fucking joke. 

Ben made his peace with staying in Derry a long time ago, but the doubt has never really left him, not throughout those twenty-two years alone here. Why is _he_ the one who stayed? He never even wanted to fight the stupid clown to begin with. He’d done it for his friends, and he’d done it to save Bev’s life, and he’d done it because—eventually—it’d become clear it was the right thing to do, but it’s always literally, viscerally scared the shit out of him. He had nightmares for months at thirteen, woke up crying or screaming every other night, to the point that his mom started sending him to a therapist in Bangor. It’s always seemed strange that _he’s_ the one who stayed, and now he’s the one who has to call everyone back. Looking at the list of names he’s made, he’s still terrified—he feels like that thirteen-year-old kid again, sneaking out the back of the school so Bowers wouldn’t see him, nervous and in awe every time he met up with the guys, unable to understand why they’d called themselves Losers because they were so much cooler than he was. Always worried that they all didn't like him, or that they hung out with him out of pity rather than genuine enjoyment. 

Ben is scared to death to call everyone back, but he knows he has to do it. Three people are dead, one attacked recently at the Canal Day festival and found bleeding out under a bridge. A message was scrawled in blood under the bridge, a message for him: _COME HOME._ It’s time. 

\---

Ben hadn’t planned on staying, but who the hell would have planned on staying? They all hated Derry, all resented Bev and Bill’s chance to get out, as much as they missed them both. (By the time they’d hit eighteen, they only saw Bill when he came back to spend the summer with his dad, and none of them had heard from Bev since they were fifteen.) Everyone had plans to get out, and Ben hadn’t been any different. But he’d made the abrupt decision midway through senior year to put his college plans on hold and take a gap year. He’d gotten into several schools, had gotten scholarships, even, but money was tight, living with a single mother, and a large part of him liked the idea of a break. He had a job out on Mike’s grandfather’s farm on weekends (and the manual labor aspect certainly appealed to him), and he’d already been told he could keep working there for a year. So he’d take a gap year, he decided, work a lot and save up money, and then when he _did_ leave for college, he would have money for things like traveling and other expenses. Money to give to his mom, even.

His mom didn’t like the idea. She was supportive, but she wanted him to go to college. She told him that a million times. “I want you to take every opportunity you get, Benji,” she’d say. And, “You aren’t staying for me, are you? Please don’t stay for me. I’m going to be fine.” And maybe an unconscious part of Ben _was_ staying for his mom, but that wasn’t the whole reason. Taking a year off really did seem to make sense at the time.

So the others left, but he didn’t. Bill headed off to Indiana, and Stan and Eddie went for schools in New York, and Richie went off to California, and Mike went for a school in Florida. He briefly considered staying when his grandfather got a cancer diagnosis, but he informed them all a few days later that his grandparents planned to sell the farm and move down to Florida with him to start treatment for his grandfather. “They’ve never been out of Derry, either, and I think they want to try something new,” he told them. 

So they all left and Ben stayed, expecting to see them at holidays or to talk on the phone or to write. (But a part of him kind of also expected that all to fall apart. Bev had promised to call and write all the time, and that had stopped, gradually. A part of him figured it was inevitable. People forget, even without an evil memory-stealing clown in the picture.)

Ben hadn’t started to figure out the amnesia thing until that first Thanksgiving, when he and his mom flew out to Nebraska to see his uncle. It was a week-long trip, and by the end of it, Ben realized he couldn’t remember any of his friends’ names when his uncle asked how they were all adjusting to college, and his mom asked if he’d heard from any of them. It freaked him out, the blank space in his mind when he tried to answer the questions but couldn’t; he’d lain awake that night, trembling in his bed, and cast his mind back as far as he could, trying to remember things, but all he could come up with was things from before they moved to Derry. Nothing between ages thirteen and eighteen; it was all shockingly, shockingly blank. Ben was stunningly relieved when they arrived back in Derry and all the memories had come flooding back when he tried to recall stuff again. He’d dismissed it as a fluke at first, but it happened again when they went to Nebraska at Christmas, and again when they drove up to a mountain house over spring break. Every time, he inexplicably lost five years of his life.

Ben pieced it together then, and that was pretty much when he decided against ever leaving Derry for longer than a couple days. Everything was starting to make sense to him—the weird phone calls with Bev that just stopped one day, the weird way Bill would act when he came home for the summer, the way that he hadn’t heard from any of the other Losers after they left Derry. His own lapse in memories. His theory, which was a little far fetched but made sense, was that your memories went out whenever you left Derry, and it scared him out of ever leaving Derry completely. He couldn’t do that, he didn’t want to risk losing memories more completely—what the hell was he supposed to do with five missing years of his life? If he forgot the best friends he’s ever had? Ben didn’t want to do that. It didn’t seem to matter if the others forgot, but he knew he didn’t want to forget, and the tests he kept doing only confirmed that he _would_ forget. So he stayed. 

Eventually, years later, Ben would remember the promise they’d made—when he was moving into a new apartment, and went through a box of old stuff, and came across research that he and Mike had been doing, and remembered the clown. Caught Its horrible, grinning face in an old drawing and shuddered all over, and his palm started stinging like crazy. He remembered the promise, the shard of glass Bill had used to cut their palms, their joined hands, and that was when he realized: if the others couldn’t remember, like he suspected, then they wouldn’t know to come back, if the clown ever came back. Someone would have to call and remind them. 

That just sealed the deal further for Ben. He couldn’t leave, because if he did, there would be none of them left. And they swore. They’d fought a clown, and maybe they’d killed it, but maybe they hadn’t—the fact that he could forget things so easily seemed to prove that they hadn’t. They’d fought a clown that’d hurt them, hunted them all like animals, killed Bill’s little brother and a bunch of other kids, and would’ve killed them, too. And they’d promised to kill It so it couldn’t kill anyone else. And Ben had stayed. They had to keep their promise, and he had to make sure it happened. He would have to bring them all home. 

\---

Life in Derry alone is odd. And lonely, without his friends. Ben had always been a lonely kid, and he guesses it's fitting that he'd morphed into a lonely adult. That's probably why he's so attached to his middle school friends—it's the only time he can remember not being lonely, when he was hanging out with the Losers. 

It's okay, sometimes, being in Derry. Not great but not excessively lonely, either. His mom moved to Nebraska when he's twenty-five, but she still flies in at holidays, or he goes out to Nebraska to see her. And he had a three and a half year relationship in his thirties, a pretty good relationship that only ended because she started talking about wanting to have kids. Which scared the shit out of Ben, because when she talked about babies and raising children with him, all he could see were missing kid posters, plastered wetly to telephone poles. A little boy's head in the tree. Betty Ripsom's mom crying outside the school. Something that wore the face of Bill's little brother, arm severed at the elbow, crying and asking to go home. And Ben would remember that the clown was coming back, that all of those horrible things would happen again, and he had to stumble out of bed and go retch wetly over the sink, when he thought about it being _his kid_ that never came home, that got hurt like that. And honestly, things had been numb in this relationship for a while, and Ben had suspected for months that it wouldn't work out, but that had ended it, the fact that he couldn't have kids with her. (Maybe couldn't have kids at all.) So he'd ended it, and his apartment was empty again, and Ben felt an odd mixture of sadness and relief. He didn't want to be alone, but nothing felt right, either. Nothing seemed to fit. 

If you had asked Ben at any point under the age of nineteen, he would've said that he'd only ever been in love with Beverly Marsh without any hint of irony. Ben views this in a more skeptical nature now, would feel silly to say this now—he's forty years old and really only knew Beverly for a couple months—but back then, he had really believed it. He had been won over immediately when she signed his yearbook—she was the only one to sign it, and it was the first time he could ever remember _anyone_ signing his yearbook, even though his mom had bought them every year since kindergarten—but they'd really bonded in the months afterward. They'd hang out and listen to music or talk about movies, flip through the channels on TV. Bev had hung around while he did repairs on the clubhouse and they'd talked then, too. They called each other a lot after she moved, without the others, and wrote letters back and forth before Bev had forgotten. Ben loved the others, but for the longest time, he'd considered Bev his best friend. He'd told her that the morning she moved that she was his best friend (still embarrassed about the poem and about kissing her in the sewers when he _knew_ she liked Bill, and it was okay that she liked Bill as long as she was happy, but he just needed her to know, just a little bit, how much he cared about her). She'd grinned at him when he said that, gave him a hug and said, "I'm going to miss you, New Kid."

He misses her sometimes, even now. Even after all these years. He misses the others, too, of course, but sometimes he’ll hear a song on the radio that they used to listen to, or a movie that she’d talked about liking, and he’ll want to tell her about it. He still has the yearbook page she signed, creased from being folded over and over, tucked in the back of his desk. He keeps most of the stuff from the Losers—pictures, books that he and Mike bought, old toys and stuff from the clubhouse—in boxes in the storage room, but he’s never really been able to throw that yearbook page out or pack it away. 

Ben thinks about the others a lot, too—it’s hard not to think about Bill and Richie, with their names popping up in the news so much. He watches Richie’s comedy specials and he reads Bill’s books, even though they leave him on edge for hours after finishing. He pokes around to see what the others are up to, too, although he has to stop after too long—his face always gets hot with habitual embarrassment, the reminder that they’ve forgotten him and might hate him for calling them back. Mike is in Washington State now, and Richie’s in L.A., and Eddie’s in New York, and Stan is in Atlanta, and Bev is in Chicago, and Bill is all over the place, but eventually in L.A. In the middle of Maine’s furious winters (although global warming is gradually taking the edge off), Ben can envy the shit out of Richie and Stan and Bill. Half of them are married, too—Stan’s been married for longer than he hasn’t, since leaving, and Bev and Eddie marry in their mid-thirties, and Bill makes headlines when he marries an up-and-coming actress. Maybe Ben envies that, too, although he tries not to. His longest relationship after the three year one lasts only four months, and he knows that they won't last any longer, not while he's living here.

Life in Derry gets worse and worse the longer Ben stays. He is surrounded by physical reminders of every single bad thing that happened that summer: the library where the clown chased him, the crumbling house on Neibolt, Bill's old house and garage, the bridge where Bowers carved an H into his stomach. He can still hear the middle school whispers about his weight, even though he's lost most of it, and still recoils at the thought of fattening food. He misses his mom a lot—he doesn’t want her anywhere near Derry, but it’s shitty to not be able to live closer to her, or to not be able to visit for very long. He daydreams about living somewhere different a lot, like the places his friends went, all exciting and bright and a thousand times removed from this tiny little town. He remembers the towns he lived in as a kid with a fondness he had never had before, just knowing that they’re somewhere different from _here_. He thinks about Nebraska a lot, takes down the faded pictures from when he was a baby, before his dad was deployed, and marvels at the scenery in the background. Weaving plains, rock formations. It’s enough to make him want to cry. Maybe it’s all just leftover nostalgia, looking at his mom and seeing her happy, looking at a father he barely remembers, but he constantly feels a lump in his throat when he thinks of Nebraska. He resents the hot Maine summer and the freezing Maine winters more and more. 

He's still plagued with loneliness. He makes a few friends but it's not the same—maybe it's unfair to _expect_ it to be the same. He breaks down and gets a dog, a large, sweet shepherd mix his mom finds on the side of the road in Nebraska. She convinces him to take him in at Christmas because she's allergic, drives to Maine with his uncle and this dog in the backseat (because Ben usually offers to host holidays, is still to scared to leave) and tells Ben he should adopt him. "You always wanted a dog when you were a kid, Benji," she says over Christmas dinner, and it's pretty damn hard for Ben to resist when the dog is whimpering and nosing against his leg for a bite of turkey. So he gets a dog, and it helps a lot, with the loneliness. They go running every morning and evening, and the dog sleeps sprawled out on his bed every night because Ben is definitely a softie. His mom called him Baxter, apparently, so that's what Ben calls him, too.

It's okay, but it's not enough. Ben sits at his desk sometimes, sketching out designs (for his job at an architecture firm in Bangor, or for a clubhouse, a home, a treehouse for the kids he'll probably never have), and remembers the days when his friends all couldn't wait to get out of here. They used to talk about where they would go when they left, imagined themselves anywhere but here. Now they're all gone and Ben has stayed behind, all these years. And he will have to call them back, make them remember, even though they won't want to. And past that… Past that, he doesn't know. He has one single picture of the seven of them outside of a box, pinned up over his work station between pictures of his mom and dad, him and his mom when he was little, his cousin's kids. It's the one his mom took when he had them all over to stay the night (his very first sleepover, although he never would've told them that). They're all jammed on his old couch, the couch he kept when his mom moved, their arms around each other, beaming into the camera. Ben looks at it a lot. 

He tries to forget it, most days—the clown, the curse, the promise. That's how it sneaks up on him. Before he knows it, it's 2016, and Adrian Mellon is dead, and the words under the bridge are calling him home. It's time to bring the others home. He's scared out of his mind, but he doesn't have a choice. 

\---

The calls go about as well as Ben predicted. They're a huge mess—nobody knows who he is, and Stan sounds like he's ready to have a heart attack, and Mike's voice takes on a guilty sort of fear, and Richie closes off the call by vomiting, and Eddie _crashes_ his _car_ , Jesus. Bill sounds more reluctant than he ever did as a kid, his voice and uncertain and confused lilt that makes Ben's stomach turn; maybe they really _can't_ do this anymore. Beverly… Bev sounds scared out of her mind when Ben calls, in a different way than the others. She's terrified and uncertain, leading Ben to reluctantly prod, on the verge of saying of _course_ she doesn't have to come, none of them do (even though he knows they have to). But her voice goes soft when she realizes who he is, soft in the way it sometimes got when they would talk on the phone late at night when they were fourteen, and Ben's hands suddenly go clammy and his heart starts pounding like he's a fucking teenager again. He bangs his head lightly against the window in disgust and tries not to feel overwhelmingly thirteen, the phrase _January embers_ dancing around in his head. He had almost forgotten writing her that poem. 

He suggests that they all meet up at a restaurant, in the end, because it feels too weird to ask them all to come to his house. He texts them all absently and spends the rest of the evening pacing in absent, nervous circles around his apartment and passing his nervous energy onto Baxter, who spends half the night whimpering and pawing at the door. He's been dreading this for twenty-odd years, and of course he's faced with stage fright now. He's been watching for the clown for months, half afraid to leave his apartment, the walls shrinking around him until he felt like he was going crazy. He's been having nightmares since the year started, has remembered things he didn't even know he'd forgotten: the sound of Henry Bowers' insane laughter, his friends screaming, the sickly sweet fear choking the back of his throat. He dreams that night and wakes up coated in sweat, images dancing behind his eyes of Eddie in the clown's grip and Stan's face buried between the teeth of the twisted face lady and Bev shrinking out of the clown's reach and Bill with a gun to his brother's head and the clown laughing like crazy. He's nervous the whole next day, his stomach twisting into wild knots that don't completely disappear until he's standing in the private room of Jade of the Orient and he hears a voice behind him saying, dimly, "Ben?"

Ben whirls and finds Bev behind him, pushing hair nervously behind her ears, a confused familiarity flickering over her eyes. He grins without even thinking. "Bev," he says. "Bev, hi. You-you got the password?"

It's a dumb thing to say, and Bev really only seems more confused by it, but recognition flickers slowly over her face, and then she's grinning right back and stepping forward to embrace him. "You know it, New Kid," she says. Ben is blushing like crazy, hugging her back tightly. "How are you doing?" Bev says into his shoulder. "I can't believe you _stayed_ all this time."

"What, in this shithole?" Ben jokes as she steps back. "It wasn't that bad, really," he adds, sheepishly. 

Bev nods a little, an absent look on her face as she rubs her palm, the one that Bill cut twenty-seven years ago. "I… forgot," she says gingerly. "I couldn't believe it until I heard it, but I really forgot. All of you."

Ben nods a little. "I know," he says. "T-that's why I stayed."

Bev's face does something Ben can't quite read, then, something like she's touched, maybe, but he can't ask because Mike walks in just then and is hugging him, too. Bill arrives after that, and then Richie, and Eddie, and Stan midway through the meal, his wrists bandaged and an odd mix of fear and relief on his face. And it's odd to put it this way, especially in the middle of everything—when Ben is still so _scared_ —but it's such a relief that they're all here, that they don't hate him and that they came… Ben can barely believe it, can feel his nerves beginning to melt away, just a little. 

\---

The next couple days pass in a blur of the expected bloody horror show, with an added edge of everyone remembering everything. Honestly, the fact that they're all together is a pretty big bright spot, and it's the only bright spot in the bunch, so Ben clings to it like crazy. Most of them seemed ready to go when Ben started into the clown shit, but Stan arriving—arriving despite being terrified, despite what he'd tried to do—seems to convince people to stay, even though everyone is still pretty on edge. 

All of them but Stan have a room at the Town House, but they end up staying over at Ben's instead. This is mostly because Mike has offered to help out with the research Ben mentions he's been doing on the clown, trying to figure out how to kill It. Then Bill volunteers to help out, probably because of his Leader/Savior complex, and then Bev talks the others into coming back with them anyway, and most of them fall asleep sprawled out across the living room, on the chairs and the couch, the same one in the picture Ben has kept up all these years. (Or, notably, Richie sleeps on the floor with his head pillowed on Baxter's side. Baxter doesn't seem to mind.)

They find rituals, they find possibilities, they dig up a shitload of muffled, repressed memories that Ben has to fill in the blanks on. (Bev apparently thinks that Bill wrote her that stupid poem and Ben is not going to tell her otherwise.) Everyone has an odd little encounter with the clown at some point between point A and point B. Their childhood bully comes knocking on the door to stab Eddie in the face and almost kill the rest of them. And eventually, yes, they go down into the sewers to fight the nightmare clown from their childhood. It goes about as well as Ben could've expected—which isn't very well, but it doesn't seem to matter, because they all _live._ They all make it out alive. 

Time slows, then speeds up, moving so fast that Ben can't process anything, really, that is happening. It speeds up and doesn't slow down again until he is sitting in the hospital waiting room, clustered in chairs between Bev and Mike and Stan and Eddie. They went straight to the hospital from the sewers, because Bill fucked up his ankle and Richie got badly slashed across his back by one of the clown's claws when he was trying to roll Eddie out of the way. Eddie, his shirt splashed with Richie's dried blood, is picking absently at the bandage on the face, his knee bouncing furiously up and down, his eyes glued to the door; he's been frantic this entire time, had been glued to Richie's side since the cistern, pressing his hoodie against Richie's bleeding back and holding his hand and snapping instructions at the nurses until they took Richie back. Stan's asleep, sprawled out in his chair, slumped against Mike, who has a similar eye turned towards the door. Bev is next to Ben, poking absently at her phone, rubbing her thumb absently over her bare ring finger. (She's mentioned, abstractly, leaving her husband and her plans to implement a divorce.) She's still covered in blood, her hair matted and sticky from where it's hardening, blood mixing with greywater and old dirt down the front of her clothes. Ben's throat tightens at the memory of the false clubhouse and the dirt piling in, suffocating him, getting into his mouth as he screamed Beverly's name. Bev's hand curling around his wrist, pulling him out of the pit, saving his life. The way she'd looked at him, right after, lying on the floor of the cistern. Ben shakes his head hard to ward off the memories and looks at the ground. 

The dirt is somehow still all over him, matted in with greywater and other unknowable substances that are pretty fucking gross, and Ben won't say a word, but he really does want it off. He scratches absently at the hardening muck on his wrist until Mike nudges him and says, "You and Bev should go clean up. It'll probably be a while longer anyway."

Bev nods a little when Ben looks questioningly at her, like she likes the idea, so he nods, too. "I'll come back in a little while and we can switch out if Richie and Bill are still back there," he says, and Mike shrugs in agreement. "Hey, Eds, you want to come with us?" Ben offers in an afterthought, figuring Eddie must be pretty desperate to get clean. 

Eddie just shoots him a blank look, like Ben is speaking a foreign language, before shaking his head. "I'll wait," he says, before shifting his gaze back to the door. He's desperate for news about Richie, Ben thinks, and leaves him alone. 

They go back to Ben's place, mostly because everyone still has their luggage there, and Ben gives Bev the first turn in the shower. He tries to rinse off some in the sink before giving up and just sitting at the kitchen table. It's still covered in the messy research he and Mike had been doing, both the twenty-some year old research and the stuff they've done over the past couple days. His eyes fall on a piece of paper from sometime in high school, his and Mike's neat handwriting faded with time. At the bottom, Mike had scrawled _Town is CURSED_ in a heavy hand. All these years later, Ben has never stopped believing that. But he's finally allowing himself to believe that the curse might be broken. 

After Ben is done in the shower, he finds Bev in the living room, leaning into the corner of the couch with Baxter sprawled tiredly in her lap. Baxter has gotten very attached to all of his friends. (Ben guesses that's what happens when a murderer breaks into your apartment. Baxter had lost in when Eddie had screamed and came bursting out of the bathroom with blood pouring down the side of his face.) But he seems to have a particular attachment to Bev, who's been hovering near him for most of the time, scratching him behind the ears and speaking in a low, affectionate voice. 

Bev looks up when Ben enters the room and says, "Hi," in a soft voice. 

"Hi," says Ben, and he sits beside her on the couch, reaching over to pet Baxter. Bev grabs his hand before he can pull it away, holding it tightly in hers. Ben shivers all over and pretends he hasn't, looks at the floor and doesn't let go of her hand. He'd heard her voice when he couldn't hear anything else, she'd pulled him out of a nightmare. He'd yelled that he loved her and meant every word of it, and at that moment, he'd started to wonder if he had ever really stopped. He traces the back of Bev's fingers with his thumb, nervously, and says, "How do you feel?"

Bev shrugs. "I'm okay. It feels nice to be clean again."

"For sure," Ben agrees. 

They sit in silence for a moment, their fingers laced together over Baxter's warm fur. Ben is nearly ready to suggest that they go back to the hospital and check on Bill and Richie, or at least let Mike and Stan come back and shower, but selfishly, he doesn't want to move. He thinks he could stay here for a thousand years. He's trying to get up the motivation to say something when Bev finally speaks. "Ben, I'm so sorry I forgot about the postcard," she says. 

"Hey, no, it wasn't your fault," Ben says immediately, squeezing her hand. "It's… it was out of our control. I figured that out a long time ago."

"Still, to make the mistake _twice_ …" Bev grimaces, stroking Baxter's head with her free hand. 

"It didn't matter," Ben says, without thinking. "As long as it made you happy."

"It did make me happy," Bev says softly. "It… really meant a lot to me." She squeezes his hand back, her palm cool in his. "You wrote me letters, too, didn't you?" she adds. "For years. Even after I forgot. You called me every week."

Ben nods, his throat thick. Bev says, her voice trembling, "I missed you. After I forgot. I… I didn't even know who I was missing, but I missed you."

Ben makes a noise in his throat, unaware he's even making it, thinking, _I'm right here,_ thinking _You signed my yearbook, you were the only one,_ thinking, _I love you._ And then Bev turns, suddenly, and leans into him, her hand warm on his jaw. She leans forward until there is no space between him and her mouth is on his, and his hands are in her hair, and he's kissing her back like he's been waiting. In a way, he has. She's laughing a little and he loves her and he thinks it might be the best kiss of his life. 

They stay there for a moment, after, his arm around her and her head on his chest, Baxter making himself heavily comfortable across both their laps. "I can't believe you stayed all this time," Bev says softly, her cheek against his chest. 

There's a dozen things Ben could say to that, some of them noble and some of them cowardly, some of them selfish, but in the end, all he can come up with is, "I didn't want to forget."

Bev shakes her head, her hair brushing his nose. "Do you think we'll forget again, when we leave?"

"No," Ben says, without even thinking. "I-I hope not," he adds, nervously. "I want to be able to leave here. I'm absolutely sick of this town."

Bev laughs a little again, finds his free hand and squeezes it in both of hers. "Do you know when you'll go? When you do leave?"

"No," Ben says. 

"I don't, either," says Bev, exhaling quietly. Her hands are cold around his. 

Ben nudges his nose against the top of her head. "Maybe," he says, so softly, uncertain, "maybe we can figure it out together." And Beverly lifts her head to look at him, then, and smiles. 

Ben thinks of blood oaths and promises, of whispered phone conversations, of the dinner table in Jade of the Orient and all of them laughing. Of everyone sleeping sprawled in his living room, of muttered, half-drunk declarations of how much they'd missed each other. Of the way Bev's voice went softer, on the phone, when she realized who he was. He smiles back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i took ben's backstory from my warped book memories, the miniseries, the movies, and stuff i made up. baxter is intended to be the dog from the end of chapter 2, because of course i had to include the dog.


	3. EDDIE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one can believe Eddie is staying, when he tells them, and they tell him that they can't believe it in so many words. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one spiraled way out of control, and was half my motivation for posting this in parts. i had too much to say. the next one is actually longer.
> 
> warning up front for parental abuse (entirely in the context of eddie's mom), a terminal illness, internalized homophobia, references to adrian mellon's death, and henry bowers.

No one can believe Eddie is staying, when he tells them, and they tell him that they can't believe it in so many words. 

Well, okay, Ben doesn't  _ say  _ anything, but he  _ looks _ astonished and disapproving, which for Ben is basically yelling in your face. Stan protests immediately, pointing out how much Eddie was looking forward to leaving and New York and no curfews and no  _ parents _ , and when Eddie protests on the basis that  _ Mike  _ is staying, for  _ literally _ the same reasons, Stan just says, "That's different, Eddie." And Mike gives a solemn nod and mutters, "It is." When Bill comes to visit for the summer and Eddie tells him, he gives Eddie a look like he has two heads and says, "R-r-really?" incredulously. 

And Richie… well, Richie handles it with his usual amount of tact: yelling a ton and calling Eddie fucking nuts. He does that a lot. He won't let it go like the others will. He says shit like, "Why the fuck don't you wanna get out of this hell hole?" and "You wanna be treated like a five year old for the rest of your life?" He actually calls Eddie a coward once, in the middle of a shouting match, and Eddie screams back that he's an asshole and heartless and why does he even fucking care, cause they're not even going to the same coasts and won't ever see each other anyway. Richie storms off angry, and Eddie’s sure that’s the end of it—of the fight, and maybe of their friendship all together. But then Richie's knocking on his window that night, his face red like he's been crying and is trying to hide it, and he's apologizing before Eddie even lets him in, saying he's sorry, he is an asshole, he just wants Eddie to get out of here and doesn't want to leave him behind, but he's sorry for calling Eddie a coward and Eddie should just punch him in the face if he's still pissed. Eddie hugs him instead, tight with his face flaming red, and calls him an ass again, and Richie laughs and messes up his hair and says, "At least you'll always be here for the holidays, Eddie-o Spaghettio," and Eddie pretends he's gonna shove Richie out the window. They don't fight about it after that, although Richie still acts kinda pissed off when Eddie brings it up. 

It's his mom. His mom is sick, and Eddie  _ knows  _ she's not faking it, because she made him go with her to the doctor. He's seen the scans. And he can't, he can't  _ leave  _ her alone to deal with that. He's walked a shaky line between love and hate with his mom for years—ever since thirteen, ever since Gretta Keene smirked at him across the pharmacy counter and his mom's face pinched with furious shock, insisting the fake medicine helped. (Ever since he came home after fighting the clown and his mom cried for three hours and he made an odd little bargain: he wrapped his arms around his knees like a little kid and told her that he'd keep taking the medicine if he could keep seeing his friends. He's spent the five years since trying to avoid the pills, pocketing them when his mom isn’t paying attention and flushing them down the toilet or dumping them in the Dumpster outside the school. He still pulls out his inhaler when he panics, when he feels like he can't breathe, and he hates himself for it, but he can’t shake the habit at all.) 

He hates his mom a little, but he saw her crying in the doctor's office, crying and keening on the edge of her chair, strangling his father's handkerchief in her palm, and he couldn't say no when she begged him to stay. He would be a horrible person if he said no, the worst person in the world, the worst son. He still has nightmares, sometimes, about being five years old and curled up in a hospital chair, his thumb in his mouth, his father asleep, his breaths wheezing. His mother howling after he was gone and clutching Eddie so hard that he felt like he was suffocating. And Eddie doesn't want to do it again, doesn't want to spend all his time in hospitals watching a parent die, doesn't want to stand by a gravesite and watch someone be lowered into the ground. He doesn't want to, he doesn't think he can do it again, but he knows he can't leave. He doesn't think about the clown often, but sometimes he has nightmares about the pharmacy basement, the moment where he turned away from his mother and ran, even if it wasn't real. He can't leave her again. He'd be smothered with guilt if he did.

So Eddie watches the others leave. He cleans out the clubhouse with them, dividing up the stuff that's been there for years, and he helps them pack for college (mostly Richie, but he goes over to Stan's and Ben's to help, too), and he meets them at the quarry for the last time, at the Barrens for the last time, at their favorite diner for the last time. It's a cycle, he tells himself, and it would've happened this way even if he wasn't staying, so he shouldn't be a baby about it. And besides, Mike is staying, and he's beyond relieved about that, so glad that he will have someone in this horrible town. He likes hanging out with Mike, and his mom will probably be weird about it, but he doesn't give a shit. He won't be alone in this stupid town. 

The summer ends too quickly, and Bill and Richie end up leaving for college on the same day. They spend their last night together out in Mike's barn, because Bill's dad doesn't give a shit and the Toziers are way cooler than Eddie's mom. Eddie spends most of the time trying not to cry, which would probably be a lot more embarrassing if everyone else wasn't doing exactly the same thing. Everyone is quiet and melancholy, and Bill offers reassurances that fall flat, and Mike keeps shooting Eddie pained looks across the circle. Richie's jokes are all muted and he's clingier than usual, hanging off of all of them but mostly Eddie. (At one point he's sprawled out in the hay with an arm slung across Eddie's rib cage and his chin on Eddie's shoulder. Eddie might've rolled away on another day, but today, he doesn't want to. He really doesn't want to.) They sleep in a heap of sleeping bags and lanky limbs and hay, which might have grossed Eddie out on any other night, but he doesn't care tonight. They sleep clustered together in a warm pile and wake up early and say goodbye to Bill and Richie at the end of Mike's huge dirt driveway. Bill's promising to call all the time, and Richie's pretending he isn't crying, and it's the first time that it's really hitting Eddie, that they are all leaving and he is staying. He's staying while his friends leave, most of whom he's known his whole life. It feels like something is being chipped out of him, somewhere under his ribs, like something is physically being taken away. 

Bill says, "I love you guys so much," and Richie tousles Eddie's hair and then they're both gone. Ben and Stan leave within the week, too. Eddie and Mike show up at their houses to hug them goodbye and then they're gone, just like that. Waving out the back of the car like it's the end (or maybe the middle) of a sad movie. It hurts like hell. 

The next few months are strange. Strange because Eddie is alone, more alone than he's been in years. He has Mike, yes, but he and Mike are both dealing with their respective family illnesses, and on top of that, Mike has the farm to deal with, so they don't see each other too often. But the others… Eddie's been seeing Ben about every day for five years—he likes to study with Ben because Ben is both smarter than him and less distracting than Richie. And, well, Bill and Richie and Stan… they've been a part of Eddie's life, constantly, since fucking  _ kindergarten.  _ Bill leaving in sophomore year strained the bond but it didn't break, because they talked on the phone constantly and he came back for the summers, and Eddie still had Richie and Stan. But now he doesn't have  _ any  _ of them for the first time in like thirteen years, and it's so fucking strange because he can't remember the last time they were all apart this long. Maybe when their vacations coincided, but that was rare; they were so fucking codependent that Eddie somehow talked  _ his mom  _ into letting him go to a two week summer camp with the guys, despite the risk of dirt and bacteria and dangerous activities. He hasn't been this lonely or separated from everyone since his forced isolation in the summer of 89. 

What makes it worse is that no one calls. They all said they would call, they  _ swore _ , and then they  _ don't fucking call.  _ Eddie spends weeks, at first, convincing himself that this is because of the long distance expense, and Mike backs him up, and they tell themselves that they will write. But they don't write. And they don't come home for weekends. And when Eddie runs into Mrs. Uris at the pharmacy, she mentions that they're moving to Bangor, and when he runs into the Toziers, they say that apparently they're spending the holidays down in L.A. with Richie, which apparently was  _ his  _ idea. And Eddie can't fucking believe it because they  _ promised,  _ they said they'd keep in touch, and they couldn't fucking believe that he was staying, so why the fuck wouldn't they call, or at least write? Or come back for the holidays, when Richie basically  _ said  _ he'd see him at holidays? What the fuck? 

Mike talks him down, a lot of the time. Rational Mike, who seems as insecure and maybe hurt as him at times, but is constantly telling Eddie that they're probably just busy, or can't afford calls, or their letters are lost, that they wouldn't abandon them completely, obviously. And Eddie is incredibly grateful for Mike. They may both be busy, but they meet up a lot on the weekends. Eddie drives out to the farm, or they go to the diner or the library or the movies, and it's lonely without the others, but it's still nice. He's always liked hanging out with Mike, and it is so fucking nice to not be the only one left in this stupid town. At least he has that when he has nothing else. 

So of course, Mike ends up leaving three months after the others. He tells Eddie at the diner, his voice thick with apologetic regret. "My grandfather found a good treatment program in New York," he says, "and they want to try it. I think they want to live somewhere besides Derry before… before the end, you know?" He winces, fidgeting with the sugar container. 

Eddie winces, too, and looks down at his hands. It's been months of the same thing for both of them, months of his mom panicking in a hospital, panicking about dying and about what's in the chemo treatments and the sterilization of the hospital and clutching Eddie's hand too hard. It's awful, but after everything that's happened over the past couple months, he almost wishes his mom had the same idea as Mike's grandpa. He's desperate to get out of here, to do anything to escape the fucking memories of his friends and every horrible thing that's happened. (There's no point in waiting for the others if none of them are coming back.) "I… I'm glad you get to get out of here," he says, trying not to sound selfish and bitter. "But… I'm really going to miss you, Mikey."

Mike smiles a little, sadly. "I'm gonna miss you, too," he says. "It's so weird to think about everything changing like this. Everyone leaving." 

"It was supposed to happen like this," says Eddie, maybe a little bitterly now. "We just… didn't go." For the first time, he's starting to think that maybe the others were right, about him staying. He hugs Mike tight before they leave and tries not to imagine how the town will feel when none of them are left but him.

Mike leaves about a month later, after his grandfather sells the farm and the house is all packed up. Eddie lies to his mom and goes out to the farm every day he isn't driving her to treatment to help Mike pack. He cries on the day Mike leaves, just before Thanksgiving, and stands in the empty dirt driveway for too long after the truck pulls away, wiping his face with the back of his wrist. He feels oddly hollow, a freezing November wind blowing around him. He walks slowly to his mom's car and drives home. 

Nobody comes home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and nobody calls, not even Mike. It's worse than the isolation of 89; it's the most alone Eddie has ever been. 

\---

Here is the routine Eddie develops after everyone leaves: Get up and cook breakfast for his mom. Do the dishes, clean the kitchen, clean the whole goddamn house. Drive his mom to treatment. Eat lunch at the same horrible restaurant that his mom loves. Watch an endless round of game shows all afternoon. Cook dinner. Sneak out after his mom is asleep and drive, as far as he can without actually leaving. Pretend he doesn't see all the places he and his friends used to love. Pretend he's able to leave, just keep going and going and going. Drive home choked with guilt and fear and nervousness and go to sleep in his shrinking childhood bedroom only to get up and do it all over again. 

The days are long and boring, with nothing to really fill them. Eddie's mom is against him getting a job—she would never let him work on the farm with the guys, and she panics about germs, robbers, long hours, being home alone, every  _ single _ time he brings it up. And she has a similar reaction whenever he brings up going to community college in Bangor. So he hangs around the house and does what she asks, because what else is he going to do? He goes to the doctor with her and holds her hand and cries alongside her when the doctor tells them that she is getting worse, because she's all he has left. His father is dead and his friends are gone, and this town is empty and haunted, and his mom is awful, his friends were right, but he still can't stand the idea of being alone. 

His mom being sick doesn't stop her from being awful. At least four times a week, Eddie will have to bite back angry remarks, or stalk off guiltily after he can't stop himself from making angry remarks, or resist the urge to punch a hole in the fucking wall. The worst time is when she criticizes his friends. On Christmas fucking Day, Eddie's sad as shit and makes an unwise comment about how upset he is that none of them came back, and his mother says, "It's better this way, Eddie-bear. I'm glad they're gone. They were such a horrible influence, always getting you trouble or getting you hurt. Those dirty little boys…" 

Eddie thinks he might yell. He definitely storms out of the house and drives off, despite his mother's wailing protests. He drives to the Barrens and puts on two sweatshirts, a winter coat, gloves, a scarf, and a hat, and grabs the musty blanket his mom takes to treatment before disappearing into the woods. It takes nearly an hour in the freezing cold, but he finds Ben's clubhouse and climbs in and spends the night there, shivering despite his layers. His mom calls him selfish when he comes back, sobbing into crumpled Kleenex, calls him selfish and horrible and Eddie can't bring himself to argue. But he can't forgive her for saying that stuff, not about his friends.

It doesn't get any better, staying at home instead of going to college, and by the time the first year is up, Eddie has decided that he's leaving as soon as his mom is better. The literal minute. (He still won't consider the idea that his mom won't get better, because if she doesn't get better, he is a horrible son for sitting around and waiting for her to die.) He's sick of his mom and he's sick of the town and he's sick of being in Derry waiting for friends who never call or write or come back, and who have probably fucking forgotten he exists by now. 

Eddie holds onto his hope until a year and a half after his friends leave, when he and his mom go to visit his aunts in northern Maine. They spend a week up there with his aunts fussing over his mom and pinching Eddie's cheeks and basically sending him into a suffocating spiral. 

It's a strange few days. Eddie's mind is foggy the whole time; he gets confused and is unable to answer his aunt's questions, he wakes up one morning and thinks,  _ I need to take my meds,  _ and recoils initially, but is taking the pills without thinking by the next day. But Eddie doesn't notice that anything is wrong until the fifth day, when one of his aunts is pinching his cheek and he thinks, absently,  _ Shit, he would never let me live this down if he could see me right now.  _ And then cold panic seizes him when he can't place who  _ he  _ is. He tries to place the voice, the wild laughter in the back of his head, but he  _ can't.  _ It's like something has been carved out of his brain. 

Eddie panics for a day. He ignores his mom and his aunts—it's easy, when all their comments are just critical sniping—and he sifts through his mind, trying to place a name to the thought and can't. And then he starts reaching for other memories and finds nothing. He can't remember the names of his friends growing up, he can't remember the names of any of his high school teachers, he can't remember what the park in his town looks like, he can't—fuck, he can't remember anything that happened in the past  _ month  _ of his life. Nothing before leaving to visit his aunts. 

And when Eddie realizes this, he suddenly can't breathe at the dinner table. He's fumbling wildly for his inhaler, gasping unevenly for breath and pulling the trigger. His mom is stumbling to her feet and rushing to his side, her face a familiar shade of pale, his aunts pressing in. Eddie's fingers are turning white on his inhaler as he wheezes, and his mom is cooing like he's a six-year-old again, stroking his hair, and he looks up at her blindly, momentarily  _ feeling  _ six again. He's thinking about doctor's offices and his mother hugging him and sobbing, and he says without thinking, "Mommy, something's wrong. I can't remember anything."

They go home first thing the next morning. Eddie's mom drives, newly imbued with energy, talking her sisters into making him tea and wrapping blankets around him in the passenger seat, and Eddie still can't breathe. He holds onto his inhaler the whole way home, until they cross the town line. Until they cross the town line and a wave of disgust hits Eddie; his throat closes up again, but in a different way, and he's suddenly shoving at the blankets, furiously thinking,  _ What the fuck, what the fuck am I doing?  _ The inhaler tumbles out of his hand and onto the floor. 

He can remember, he discovers later, when he casts his mind back. He can remember, and he doesn't understand why earlier he couldn't. He doesn't understand it, and he doesn't understand his reaction, his running to his mom like a little kid again, taking his goddamn _sugar pills,_ the gazebos. His mom won't leave him alone when he gets home, won't stop hovering over him, and only really backs off when she gets tired herself, and Eddie's head is spinning with confusion. 

That night, an idea arises in his mind: what if you forget when you leave Derry? What if  _ everyone  _ forgets? It's a stupid fucking theory, but it makes sense, it's the only thing that would explain why his spontaneous amnesia fucking disappeared when they arrived back in Derry. And it… it would also explain why everyone stopped talking to him after they left. (Even  _ Mike,  _ who kind of got abandoned with Eddie before he left. Why would Mike stop calling when he knew how it felt to be on the other end?)

Eddie kind of dismisses the idea by morning. It sounds fucking ridiculous in the daylight, what the fuck would even  _ cause  _ that? (He thinks absently about the summer of 1989, the fucking  _ clown _ , and then his brain flinches away furiously, he won't think about that, it's fucking  _ over  _ and it's irrelevant, and It’s dead, and it can’t be that.) This is just wishful thinking, and whatever happened yesterday was just… a fluke. A fluke, or he's sick, he has a brain tumor and he's gonna die alongside his mom alone in Derry…

Eddie goes to the doctor, who finds nothing. His scans come up clean. He tells the doctor what happened and the doctor just gives him a weird look. "You're not sick, son," he says in a low voice so Eddie's mom won't hear, "and you never have been. Okay?"

So, a fluke. A weird thing. Maybe his aunts put shit in their tea. Because there's no way people forget when they leave Derey, and he's just trying to overcompensate for his friends losing touch, and it's just a  _ fluke _ . But it scares the shit out of Eddie, enough to scare him out of moving away. Even after his mom dies, two years later, Eddie stays. He doesn't know what else to do. He keeps returning to the moment where he couldn't place shit that Richie had said, or the moment where he unthinkingly took his meds, like he'd forgotten the lesson he learned at thirteen and returned to being that tiny, scared kid who took the pills regularly, without even questioning that… He doesn't  _ want  _ that. He wants to be in control. He  _ has  _ to be in control. 

So he doesn't leave. He stays with his mom, even though she has made his childhood miserable, and he stays in Derry even after she's gone, because he is too scared to do otherwise. 

\---

Eddie goes back to school after his mom dies. He's twenty-two and it feels odd, but it's what he wanted at eighteen, and it's what he still wants. What the fuck else is he gonna do here in Derry? It's not like he has a job to stay at or anything like that. He goes to school in Bangor, paying for it with the money his mom left him, and when an old friend of his dad's offers him a temp job at an insurance company in Hampden, he takes it. 

His life morphs into a sort of predictable monotony. For years and years, there in Derry. He hates it there, but he is still too scared to leave. He goes to school in Bangor and he goes to work in Hampden and he drives back to Derry to sleep in the guest room because he doesn't want to sleep in his childhood bed and his mom's room is out of the question. He feels unwelcome in his own goddamn house. He saves up until he can afford an apartment on the other side of town, and then he moves, guilt clogging his throat like an empty drain. He spends the first night cleaning, obsessively scrubbing the floors, the walls, the sconces, the sink, the toilet, because it feels all wrong, the new place, being away from his home. And then he cracks open the window and sleeps the whole next day. He wakes up breathing the cool spring air that next night, in a new place, a place his mom has never touched, and it's still fucking Derry, but it feels better, it actually feels fucking okay. 

He graduates college. He gets a permanent job at the insurance company. He visits his parents' graves in Bangor, out of loneliness or maybe obligation. (He tries not to think about it too much.) He makes friends at work and goes out for drinks and dinner and whatever, and it's nothing like how things used to be with the Losers. This pisses him off mostly because it's a ridiculous standard to hold adults to, to the same standard as that ragtag, lonely group of kids, but he can't stop thinking about it and he can't stop missing them. 

It's something that Eddie ridicules himself for pretty often until the Toziers move out of Derry when he's twenty-eight. He still runs into the Toziers pretty often around town, that's how he knows they're moving, but he doesn't expect  _ Richie  _ to come back. He hasn't been back in  _ years _ . That's why Eddie about has a heart attack when he goes to pick up a pizza (no, Ma, he is  _ not  _ lactose intolerant—although he does go for that weird gluten free crust for obvious reasons) and finds fucking Richie Tozier there, his hair a wild mess and one lens of his glasses smudged with dirt and wearing an extremely ugly button up shirt over a t-shirt that reads  _ MORE COWBELL  _ and  _ holy shit.  _ "Holy fucking shit," Eddie says out loud without even realizing it. He hasn't seen any of the Losers since Mike left. 

Richie whirls around, jostling a two liter of Coke in the crook of one arm, and gives Eddie a weird look. Well, okay, all Richie's looks are weird, but this one is  _ foggy _ . It… it looks the way Eddie felt when they left Derry for the week to go to his aunt's. "Shit," says Richie, echoing him. "Shit, man, I know you from somewhere…" 

Eddie bites the inside of his cheek too hard. He says, "I'll never forgive you if you've forgotten me, Trashmouth,” more jovial than he feels; what if Richie  _ has  _ forgotten, or worse, he doesn’t want to see Eddie in the first place?

But this doesn’t happen. Recognition dawns on Richie's face all at once, and he blurts, "Holy shit. Holy shit, Eds! Eddie Kaspbrak! Fuck, man." He jerks forward and throws his arms around Eddie in a messy hug, smushing the two liter between their chests. "Fuck, it's been… how long has it been?"

"Ten years," Eddie says, hugging him back tightly, pretending his heart isn’t pounding with horrible, frantic relief.

"What the  _ fuck, _ " says Richie, tousling his hair as he steps back. "Shit, Eddie, I… what the hell have you been up to all these years?"

"Fucking nothing, Rich, it's Derry," says Eddie, laughing. It's not even funny, but he hasn't laughed like this in years. To the point where people are giving him weird looks because he's cackling wildly in a pizza shop, but he doesn't care; one of his friends is  _ back,  _ in Derry, and he knows who Eddie is. 

"Jesus Christ, dude, I had no idea you stayed," Richie says, slipping the soda into the crook of one arm. Eddie remembers themselves at eighteen, suddenly, Richie glaring at him, calling him a coward. Apologizing later in Eddie's room, hugging him like he just did, except longer, except tighter… 

Eddie swallows. Richie said he wanted Eddie to get out of here, and he never has. "Yeah, it just kind of… ended up that way," he says gingerly, his breath going whistley. He thinks of his inhaler, in a drawer at home because he doesn't carry it anymore. He changes the subject. "You here to help your parents move?"

"Yeah, they suckered us into it," Richie says, adjusting his glasses and grinning, that thousand-watt grin that Eddie remembers from childhood. "My mom mentioned you, actually, said she sees you all the time… I can't believe I didn't remember who…" Richie's brow furrows with confusion. 

Eddie's throat is tight; he focuses on breathing slowly and deeply as Richie's face scrunches up with confusion, until the guy behind the counter calls, "Gluten-free veggie pie for Eddie?" Eddie goes over to grab the box and cranes his neck to look back at Richie. "How long are you in town, Trashmouth?" he asks, thinking not of forgetting or of the months of silence from Richie and the others—no phone calls, no letters, no nothing—but instead of the night that Richie left, all of them tangled together in the hay in Mike's barn, Richie gripping the tail of his jacket like they were six years old again. "We should catch up."

"Leaving tomorrow, Eds-o," Richie says, so seamless it seems natural, chewing the inside of his cheek. "But, hey, we got the U-Haul all packed up. I could come see Castle Kaspbrak, steal some of this health-ridden monstrosity." He drums his fingers on the top of Eddie's gluten-free veggie pie. "Is my true love Mrs. K there?" he adds in a sickly sweet voice. 

"Shut the fuck up, asshole. No, she… she died a couple years ago." Eddie grimaces a little. "I'm in an apartment over on Cedar Street, out near the school, remember?"

"Yeah, sure… Shit, Eds, I'm so sorry. I didn't know…" Wincing, Richie leans in abruptly to envelope Eddie in another hug, nearly smashing the pizza box before Eddie yanks it out of the way. 

Eddie hugs him back gingerly, one arm around his back. "It's okay, Rich, seriously," he says. "Although maybe stop leading with horrible 'your mom' jokes, you fucking idiot."

"Who's joking, Eddie Spaghetti? I was in  _ love  _ with your mom, I am  _ devastated _ ." Richie pats his back vigorously before pulling away. "So you're over on Cedar? Those fancy apartments where… shit, shit, there was someone there we went to visit all the time. Those apartments?"

"Uh, yeah," Eddie says, surprised. It was Stan's grandmother, who made great cookies, and taught Bill and Eddie how to gamble one rainy day. "They're not really fancy, but… 312. Come on over."

\---

Richie comes back to Eddie's apartment after dropping most of the pizzas at his house. He brings a case of beer, which he announces when Eddie buzzes him in: "Eddie Spaghetti! How fucking awesome is it to be able to  _ buy beer _ ?" (Richie's the one Eddie got drunk with for the first time, frantically shushing each other on Eddie's back porch because they couldn't stop giggling. Eddie made Richie jump the fence into the neighbor's yard to get rid of the beer cans.)

They end up sitting around on Eddie's couch, eating pizza and catching up on the past ten years. Richie's got stories about college, about L.A., about his current job at a T.V. station, about the stand-up he's been idly writing for a year now. He's still determined to have a career in comedy, and his Voices sound  _ good _ now, he’s gotten great at it. Eddie's stories seem pretty pathetic in comparison, but he catches up Richie on Derry: who left, who stayed, who got married and who got divorced and all that bullshit. It dissolves into reminiscing, remembering the others; Richie seems a little confused when Eddie brings up the other Losers at first, especially Bev—who they haven't talked to in like thirteen years—but he seems to gradually remember, and he's eventually doubled over on the couch laughing as they recount a third grade field trip where Bill fell into a creek. The fog fades, gradually, but Eddie can't help but be hyper-aware of the gaps. Can't stop remembering his memory lapse at his aunt's, or the way that it took Richie a while to realize who he is. 

(Weirdly enough, the biggest lapse in Richie's memories seems to be the summer of 1989. He looks blank when Eddie recounts stories, and he says, "Wait, Eddie, what the fuck, you broke your arm?" when Eddie brings that up; Eddie didn't think Richie could ever forget that. He doesn't seem to remember the clown, either, because he doesn't get freaked out when Eddie brings up 1989, but Eddie shoves that thought away as soon as it comes up, because he does not like thinking about the clown, it makes him dissolve into frantic asthma— _ panic _ —attacks, and it's horrible, and he won't do that tonight.)

The night moves too fast, faster than Eddie expects. He's laughing so hard his stomach hurts, arguing with Richie about the benefits of gluten-free veggie pizzas, among other things. Richie seems as happy as Eddie feels, his face flushed, grinning like they're kids again. At some point, they end up sprawled out on Eddie's made bed, because the best TV is in there and Richie wants to show Eddie the show he works on. ("That guy, that dude, he likes chai tea and blueberry scones," Richie says at one point, jabbing a finger at the TV, at some guy with a weird mustache. "He's a  _ dick _ , Spaghetti, he thinks I’m a fucking intern. But he likes my standup.") Even after they've watched an episode of the show, they still don't move, finishing off the beer, Richie eating all the Oreos Eddie bought like three months ago and has barely touched since. Eddie doesn't mind. 

"I've missed… I've missed you so  _ much,  _ Eds," says Richie at one point, later, draped limply on top of him. Eddie can feel his glasses against his neck. He finds that randomly hilariously and giggles wildly. Richie's head bumps against his. "I've  _ missed  _ you, I swear I have."

"You didn't even remember me," Eddie says. He's never been quite sure that he believes that, but he's suddenly sure it's true. 

"I did, though. Even though I… didn't, you know? I  _ did _ ." Richie sounds very serious. Eddie turns onto his stomach and shoves the glasses off of Richie's face like they're eight years old again, but it doesn't stop him; he's still staring at Eddie solemnly. "I don't know how I ever forgot you," he adds. "You short little maniac. Eddie Spaghetti."

"Don't  _ call _ me that," Eddie says, his words slurring, shoving at his shoulder while Richie laughs like crazy. He shoves at his shoulder again. "You fucking idiot. I missed you, too." 

Richie blinks at him, shocked, his eyes wide. They look smaller without his glasses, but they're still huge. Eddie can see when they're this close. "You… you  _ missed  _ me?" he says, like he can't believe it. Like he somehow can't believe it. 

"Yes, dumbass," Eddie says automatically. " _ Yes.  _ This town is so fucking awful, it's… I really miss you, Rich." The next line is,  _ I miss all of you,  _ but Eddie just says, "I miss you."

Richie just stares at him, his eyes huge. And then he leans forward abruptly and kisses Eddie, sloppily, their mouths crashing together. 

Eddie's brain is short circuiting a little, like he can't believe it's happening, and also probably from the beer, but he doesn't care. When Richie pulls back uncertainly, something like panic in his eyes, Eddie just leans in and starts kissing Richie again. He kisses Richie hard, like he's been waiting for years. (Maybe he has.) He grips Richie's stupid t-shirt in both hands and shoves him back a little and kisses him and kisses him. Richie's hands are in his hair and his cheeks feel somehow wet, and he keeps mumbling his name, keeps mumbling, "Eds…" but they don't stop. They lie tangled up on Eddie's bed and kiss like they are teenagers for what feels like hours. Eddie kind of thinks Richie is crying at one point but that sounds insane. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he can hear his mom talking about blood and hangnails, can hear the rasp of a strangely familiar but unplaceable voice, but he pushes it back because it doesn’t matter. It's  _ Richie.  _ It's Richie, it's his best friend. 

Eddie's never kissed another guy before. Never really even thought about it. He shared an awkward kiss with a girl at the Homecoming dance in sophomore year, and he's exchanged kisses on blind dates that lead nowhere. But it doesn't seem strange, kissing Richie. It feels better than any of those kisses ever fucking did. It feels  _ right.  _

They don't move when they finally stop kissing. They just lie back on the bed, still tangled up, Richie's arms looped around Eddie's back and Eddie's head on Richie's shoulder. Richie's got his face in Eddie's hair and he's mumbling something like, "Didn' know… thought you wouldn't wanna…" 

Eddie hugs him tight and shuts his eyes. "Missed you, Rich," he mutters, his face turned into Richie's neck. He thinks he feels Richie kiss the top of his head, but he might imagine it. He falls asleep like that, their legs tangled together and Richie's hands gripping the back of Eddie's shirt. 

\---

In the morning, Eddie wakes up alone. Wakes up underneath the blanket from the back of the couch, next to a glass of water and three aspirins on his bedside table. There's a scrawly note from Richie beside it, written like he did it in a frantic hurry.  _ Eds, Had to run. The U-Haul rides at dawn. I had a lot of fun catching up with you, you little maniac. Give me a call sometime, or hit me up if you're ever in L.A. Get out of this shithole, it sucks. Catchya later, Dr. K.  _

Eddie's head pounds at the words, aching all over. Maybe he's crazy, but he thinks he heard Richie say last night that they weren't leaving for his parents' new house til ten in the morning, and the clock next to him definitely says 7:00. 

His mind recoils at that. Genuinely recoils in horror, and he groans out loud, audibly, because he thinks he's going to throw up, and he can't fucking think about it. (Richie not wanting to see him. Richie running away in the morning so he wouldn't have to talk to him—Jesus fucking Christ, maybe Richie  _ didn't  _ forget. Maybe Eddie's just the biggest fucking idiot in the world.)

He won't think about it. He takes the aspirin and drinks the water, the whole glass, the sensible part of his brain prattling on about the importance of staying hydrated when hungover. (He does not remember how Richie used to make fun of him when he rattled off the medical facts. He used the British voice.) He drinks the water and goes back to sleep and doesn't cry. And he doesn't call Richie, despite him leaving his number scrawled under his note. He isn't sure if Richie really had to go or just didn't want to talk to him, or if he will have forgotten by the time Eddie calls. And Eddie really doesn't want to find out. 

\---

Here is the thing: Eddie never  _ forgets  _ the clown. He never actually forgets anything, since he never leaves because forgetting scares him. But he does kind of forget two things. He forgets that the clown comes back every twenty-seven years. And he forgets that they promised to come back, too. Selective fucking amnesia at its finest. He forgets, mostly, until he is thirty-nine and ends up moving again, to a bigger apartment that'll shave a few minutes off of his commute. That's when he finds the boxes he hasn't opened in years. The ones labeled  _ Loser's Club _ that he had hidden at the back of his college back when he still lived with his mom, and hadn't opened when he first moved out cause it was just too painful. 

It's fun memories at first. Painful at times—Eddie kind of wants to cry when he finds notes he saved from Richie, written in indecipherable, smudged orange pen, and he kind of hates himself for it—but fun. Fun like when he reads Beverly's fashion mogul interviews, or looks at pictures of Ben's buildings, or reads excerpts of Mike's dissertation, or reads Bill's books. (It's kind of funny that literally four of his friends became famous—five counting Mike, who isn't conventionally famous but makes academic headlines constantly. He teaches history at fucking Columbia and gives talks all over the place. Eddie thinks it's kind of hilarious that so many of them ended up so successful, but also he's gonna strangle Bill someday for the little hypochondriac kid in the werewolf book _. _ ) But then Eddie opens a box and finds a folder near the bottom, labeled  _ Clown Research  _ in Ben's prim handwriting, and his stomach rolls. Rolls as he finds a handwritten timeline via Mike and Ben, with years labeled next to horrific events. Everything that happened in 1989. And then  _ 2016 _ , written right there with a question mark next to it.  _ 2016?  _ 2016, which is two fucking months away. 

Eddie's palm suddenly starts stinging like crazy—the palm that Big Bill had sliced, his eyes so solemn—and he curses and stumbles to his feet, only to barrel into the bathroom and dig for his inhaler. He hasn't used that stupid fucking inhaler in  _ three years.  _

They're supposed to come back. They promised Bill—Bev  _ saw it, _ she said she saw them all as adults, and Eddie had unquestioningly believed her then. They swore to come back, and Eddie is already here. And if the theory that he's been turning over and over in his head since he was nineteen is true, if you  _ forget  _ when you leave Derry—if they've all forgotten, Bill and Richie and Stan and Mike and Bev and Ben, everyone braver than him… 

Eddie doesn't want to think about it. He  _ won't _ fucking think about it, he almost fucking  _ died _ the first time, almost got eaten with his arm snapped in half and his friends screaming—he never even wanted to  _ do  _ this, he  _ told _ them all he didn't want to. It's not his fucking fight. He had done it, for Bill and eventually for Bev, but he doesn't think he can do it again. He'll ignore it, he'll fucking  _ leave  _ and live with the memory loss, what does he have left here anyway? 

Eddie is ready to do it, ready to pull out of his lease and drive away and never see Derry again, fuck this town and fuck its fucking monsters. But then he remembers the rest of it. The missing kids, the posters that Ben saved—the wrinkly black and white photos smiling up at Eddie. They never got to grow up. Betty Ripsom's mom outside the school. Bill fucking  _ sobbing  _ at Georgie's funeral, insisting he was still alive. Georgie Denbrough, that cute little kid who followed them absolutely everywhere. Bill alternately loathed him and idolized him, like they all did, but he was kind of a surrogate younger brother for all of them. (Stan and Eddie didn't have any siblings, and Richie had an older sister but was beyond sick of being the youngest. He loved pulling rank on Georgie.) Georgie had died scared and he'd died alone, and Bill had never been the same afterwards. And all those other fucking kids.  _ Them _ , almost; they'd almost died, all the Losers. And it'll be more kids next year, more kids just like Georgie and Betty and Ed Corcoran who didn't deserve to die. More people will die if he doesn't do something. 

Eddie doesn't want to stay. He doesn't want to stay, and he doesn't want to fight that fucking clown again. He debates for three days, he paces his gradually emptying apartment, he clings to his inhaler like it's a lifeline. He starts to pack the car, once, puts three boxes in the car before he stops in pure disgust. 

But he has to stay, in the end. He has to stay and call the others back, because what kind of fucking asshole would he be if he didn't? He has to do it for the kids who have died and the kids who will die, and because he promised all those years ago. They all did. They all cut their hands, all swore to come back and come together. And he is sure as shit gonna hold the others to their promise. He'll get them back, somehow; he has to. 

Life has been okay in Derry, all these years. Eddie goes to work and comes home, he makes friends at work and that's pleasant enough, he goes to meetings of a fucking book club and goes for long drives around the county and rents movies and all that shit. It's routine, it's comforting, it's lonely as shit. He feels like a rat in his cage sometimes, pacing the boundary without ever going any further than the edge. It's fucking suffocating, and it's so fucking lonely. He wants to be able to  _ leave,  _ to leave and not be afraid. He… he wants to see his friends again. He's nearly forty, he should've moved on, but he  _ misses  _ them. He's missed them since they left. The fact that they never called or wrote never stops hurting, even though Eddie thinks it wasn't their fault. He misses them all, and even though calling them back to fight a murder clown will be fucking horrible… he still wants to see them all again. He thinks that factor of the whole thing might make it worth it. 

So Eddie spends the next nine months preparing for something he doesn't even want to do. He digs through piles of research done by seventeen-year-olds to try and figure out how the clown will die, or maybe what the clown even  _ is.  _ Ben and Mike were smart as shit, but their research isn't very telling; they clearly started focusing more on Derry history after a while. He does research to try and figure out where his friends are, or at least to get their phone numbers so he can call them back. (He still has the phone number on the note from Richie, but he has no idea if the number still works. Richie's pretty fucking famous now, even if his comedy is pretty unrecognizable compared to that bug-eyed kid with his Voices, and he might've changed his number. He doesn't even remember who Eddie is, and he probably has no interest in talking to him anyway.) He spends more time trying to reacquaint himself with the people that his friends are now. It feels odd, seeing his friends all grown up. 

He has a list, and he keeps it for when the clown comes back. He watches, anxiously waits and observes like a prisoner looking to escape execution. He keeps reading Bill's books (and keeps composing a list of things to complain to Bill about when he sees him again, because Eddie is positive that at least three major Bill Denbrough characters are basically him), and he keeps reading Ben and Bev's interviews, and he keeps watching Richie's comedy, and he keeps a photo of all of them (taken by a Fourth of July festival-goer with Mike's camera: all of them posing in front of Paul Bunyan) on his fridge. And he waits. And when people start dying, he deadbolts his door and buys locks for the window and sleeps in anxious snatches, his eyes on the windows, the air vents, the drains. It never came into his house, before, but it had gone into Bill's and it had gone into Beverly's. So Eddie knows it can come into his. 

So he waits and he watches and he cries when kids are reported missing, and he stares at the list on his kitchen counter, and the picture on the fridge, as his stomach knots together and his throat closes up. But he isn't sure it's really the clown until July. Kids go missing all the time, in Derry, it's not unusual. Eddie tells himself about a million times that it might not be It, because he doesn't  _ want  _ it to be It, humans can be stopped, the kids might still be alive. But Eddie knows in July. Knows when he hears the police report about a man being attacked with his boyfriend and killed under a bridge at the festival. Knows when he hears the details. He died due to bite wounds, unnatural looking bite wounds, and his boyfriend claims to have seen a clown. The attackers— _ not  _ the clown—threw away the guy's asthma medication. He was having an asthma attack and they threw away his inhaler. The cops found it floating in the river. Someone wrote  _ COME HOME  _ repeatedly on the underside of the bridge. 

(Eddie panics. His throat closes up and he can't breathe and he ends up having a panic attack that feels like it lasts hours, curled up in a defensive ball in his bathroom. He uses his inhaler for the first time in years and it does nothing. All he can hear is the clown's voice, whispering  _ Wheezy  _ in his ear, whispering things about diseases; his mother prattling on about medicine and gazebos and asthma and AIDs, and Eddie hyperventilates on the bathroom floor. The man was killed, he knows, because of him. As a message to him. His name was Adrian Mellon. Eddie knew him, sort of; for a while, he was the youngest member of Eddie's stupid fucking book club.)

So Eddie calls after that. He locks the door to his bedroom and pulls all the curtains shut and grabs his phone and his list and the picture off the fridge (all of them making obnoxious faces into the camera, sticking their tongues out or crossing their eyes, putting their fingers up in rabbit ears behind each other's heads) and starts calling. No one remembers who he is, of course, but that doesn't make the rush of relief Eddie has when he hears all of their voices (Bill, Stan, Ben, Bev, Mike, Richie) for the first time in years any less meaningful. 

They all show up. For a while, Eddie kind of thinks Stan might bail (which he can't really blame him for at all—he remembers standing outside the sewers with Stan, his hands coated with nervous sweat, exchanging fearful looks that partially said,  _ I don't wanna do this,  _ but also said,  _ Bill and Richie are fucking nuts _ ). But Stan comes, too, nervous and pulling his sweater sleeves down over bandaged wrists. Bill looks smaller than he ever did when they were kids, and Mike immediately engulfs Eddie in a hug and starts apologizing for leaving him alone, and Ben offers defenses of Eddie's stammered explanations, and Bev looks so different from when they were kids (Eddie never got to see her grow up) but she looks exactly the same, too, and Richie is just like he was twelve years ago, even if he won't meet Eddie's eyes. (He made a choking sound, on the phone, towards the end of the conversation. Like he remembered what happened in Eddie's apartment. Eddie is trying not to think about it.) They go to Jade of the Orient, because after forty years in Derry, Eddie knows this is about the nicest and cleanest restaurant in town (this isn't saying much), and the fortune cookies explode in a bunch of fucking nightmares at the end of the meal, and Eddie thinks that they are going to leave, for a little while, and he thinks if he did, he'd go with them, but they stay. By some sheer miracle, they stay. So he stays, too.

\---

They end up splitting up the next day, after a mostly sleepless night at the Town House (which happens mostly because Mike and Bill are suggesting that they talk strategy and, yeah, Eddie doesn't really want to be alone in his apartment), because Mike finds a ritual that they agree is generally worth a try. (Eddie isn't insanely keen on the ritual,  _ or  _ on splitting up, but he has no better ideas. Just because he called everyone back doesn't make him, like, the New Bill or something. Fuck that. He's just the guardian, he's just manning the watchtower.) To do the ritual, they have to find "sacrifices" (Eddie is definitely not sacrifice material, fuck you, Richie), and they have to split up to do it, according to Mike. So that's what they do. 

Eddie, for his part, goes back to his apartment because he figures he can use his ancient fucking inhaler for a sacrifice. Why the fuck not? He's been using it since that summer. He goes back, a little sad that they're already splitting up so soon, but also noting that this isn't exactly a  _ pleasant  _ reunion. So, sure. He goes back and locks all the windows again and sits around with his phone in case someone has a clown related emergency, and tries not to feel extraordinarily pathetic about the fact that he's by himself in the middle of all this. And aside from mentally reliving literally every nightmare interaction from when he was thirteen, that's pretty much all Eddie does for a few straight hours. Until Henry fucking Bowers breaks into his apartment and stabs him in the arm and knocks him to the ground.

There's a moment when Bowers is on top of him trying to kill him when Eddie can't believe that fucking  _ this  _ is how he's gonna die. Not even by the stupid clown. He feels like a fucking idiot for suggesting they split up, for agreeing to do this in the fucking  _ first place,  _ and he feels thirteen years old again, pinned to the ground by his childhood bully trying to kill him the way he tried to kill Ben and tried to kill Mike and probably would've killed all of them. A scream is caught in his throat as he tries to force the knife away, Bowers looming over him, and then something is crashing down on Bowers' head. A vase. A vase crashes down on Bowers' head, and Bowers tumbles heavily off of him, the knife tumbling to the ground. 

Eddie clutches his bleeding arm and stares up at Richie, whose face is sheet-white and eyes are huge. "Shit," he hisses through clenched teeth, and then he lurches to the side, vomiting noisily on the rug. Eddie winces, pressing his hand hard over his wound. "Is he dead?" Richie rasps, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. 

Eddie shakes his head frantically, unable to take his eyes off of Bowers. "N-no, he's just unconscious," he says; he can see the rise and fall of Bowers' stomach. He fumbles with his blood-wet hand for his cell phone to call the police. 

Richie looks over at him miserably, stepping away from the vomit on the floor. "Eds, are you okay?" he asks. Eddie nods, tentatively, and Richie kneels abruptly to engulf him in a hug. Eddie thinks of that night on his bed even though he doesn't want to, of Richie's arms around him, and he hugs Richie back immediately, still shaking from fear.

He calls the police quickly, and then he and Richie lock themselves in the bathroom in case Bowers wakes up again. Richie finds a bounty of medical supplies in Eddie's cabinet (obviously) and goes about cleaning and bandaging Eddie's wound, crouching in front of where he sits on the closed toilet. "Y-you're a lot better at this than when we were kids," Eddie says, chewing his lower lip, his breath wheezing. He's eyeing the inhaler on the bottom shelf of the open medicine cabinet longingly, but he desperately wants to avoid using it. 

"Fuck you, dude, I was an amazing Dr. K when the situation called for it," says Richie, his voice still shaking. 

"One time, you just poured an entire bottle of rubbing alcohol on my skinned knee. You didn't even try to get the gravel out!"

"Disinfectant, right?" Richie still sounds a little sick, wrapping the bandages tight around Eddie's forearm. He won't meet Eddie's eyes. He hasn't since that first night, since he got roaringly drunk and spent the whole night teasing Stan and Ben, and refusing to help them with the research, and loudly pointing out (from one of Mike's hotel beds) what a good idea it'd be to leave. He's barely said  _ anything _ to Eddie.

Eddie's breath goes high and whistley, and he shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath. If he might die tonight or tomorrow or at any point in the next couple days, he has to do this and he has to do it now. Richie was his best friend growing up and he can't stand the idea that he might hate him now, so he has to make sure he doesn't. "Richie, listen," he blurts, forcing his eyes open. "About what happened twelve years ago… you don't need to… we can forget it, okay?" It fucking  _ hurts _ to say it for some ungodly reason, but he keeps going, because he needs Richie as a friend if nothing else. "If you… regret anything…" he adds uneasily. 

Richie looks up at him, then, and he really does look sick, he looks horrified. "Eds, I don't—" he begins, his voice sharp, and looks away. "I didn't  _ regret _ … I ran because I was  _ scared _ , okay?"

Eddie bites down too hard on his lower lip and winces. "You… were scared?" he says in a lilting voice. 

"Fucking yes, Eddie, of course I was scared. I grew up in this town scared out of my mind of the fucking homophobes on every corner, and I forgot it all when I left,  _ both _ times, and you…" Richie takes a shaky breath, and enfolds one big hand over Eddie's. He says in the quietest voice Eddie has ever heard from him, "I've been in love with you since we were kids, Eds."

Eddie's fingers tangle unconsciously with Richie's, anxiously bunching together, his chest tight. He says, softly, "What?"

"Thirty years, Eds. Maybe more. I carved our initials on the goddamn Kissing Bridge, for fuck's sake. And I've… I've been terrified of that for years, I was terrified you would hate me if you found out, and I ran away because I'm an asshole and a coward, and I didn't know I'd forget you as soon as I left this fucking place, and I felt like a fucking idiot." Richie squeezes his hand, looking down at the tiled floor. "And… I'm sorry, Eddie," he adds, his voice wobbling. "I'm really fucking sorry."

Eddie takes his own trembling breath, staring at his inhaler. He's thinking of that night when they were eighteen, when Richie climbed into his window to apologize. "You're not the coward, Rich," he says quietly. 

Richie shoots him an incredulous look, his eyes bright with held-back tears. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"You were right," Eddie says. "Twenty-two years ago, you were right, Rich. When you called me a coward. When you said I'd never leave. It's been twenty-seven years, and the closest I've come to leaving this town was because I was afraid to fight this fucking clown."

Richie really is looking at him like he's nuts now, like he can't fucking believe it. "Are you fucking kidding me?" he says, maybe a little angrily, or maybe just in disbelief. "You're not a coward, Eds. You're the bravest person I know."

Eddie inhales sharply at that, something in his stomach twisting, and then he's leaning forward abruptly to kiss Richie, the way he'd kissed him twelve years ago. Richie gasps a little, low in his throat, his hands clutching at the hem of Eddie's shirt. Eddie goes onto his knees on the floor beside Richie, kissing him like it's twelve years ago, like there isn't an unconscious childhood bully on the other side of the door or a clown to kill or anything like that, until they hear something like the police at the door. 

And then there's Bev and Mike and Stan and Ben (with a bandaged stab wound on one cheek and a desperately pale demeanor when he sees Bowers in handcuffs) showing up at Eddie's door in a panic, and then they're leaving to look for Bill at Neibolt, and Eddie knows that this is probably it, that they have to go down now and they might not come back. He finds Richie's hand briefly while they're piling into the back of Mike's rental car, squeezes and lets go and mutters, low in his ear, "I'm glad we got to talk before we fucking die."

Maybe he'd meant it as sarcasm, or as a grim premonition, Eddie isn't sure—he actually does kind of believe that they'll die today, and he has Stan's anxiety to back him up. But either way, Richie bugs his eyes out at him and says too loudly, "We're not going to  _ die,  _ Spaghetti, fucking Christ." And despite everything that Eddie is thinking and feeling right now, despite every ounce of  _ common fucking sense,  _ Eddie actually believes him. 

And later, after they don't die—when they've sped towards the nearest town that isn't Derry and gotten a huge hotel room, when everyone is sprawled out asleep or falling asleep on the bed and the carpets—Richie meets Eddie's eyes over top of Stan (who has fallen asleep between them, hugging the phone that he used for a forty minute conversation with his wife like a teddy bear) and raises his eyebrows mischievously like,  _ I told you so, fuckhead.  _

Eddie rolls his eyes at that, obviously, but he takes Richie's hand when it's offered, stretching over Stan's side. Or maybe he reaches out, he isn't sure. He takes Richie's hand and holds on, and doesn't tell Richie to shut up when Richie starts going on about how he should come to L.A. now that he's technically homeless, where's he gonna go, an old hermit like him? He  _ definitely _ doesn't want to stay in Derry. And for the first time, he's not afraid to leave anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this has a lot of references to lighthouse keeper with a divergence at one point: eddie's mom getting sick and passing away sooner here than she did there. the scene at the barn is taken from lighthouse keeper. 
> 
> i included the mike & eddie subplot as a reference to the conversations they have in LK about eddie's guilt over leaving and mike telling him that he's staying for different reasons. (i went with a different future for mike than the one i gave him in ben's story cause i thought it would be fun to explore some different possibilities.) 
> 
> the richie returns plotline is also a reference to LK, as well as my earlier story, midnights and the deadlights, wherein richie returns to help his parents move, briefly remembers and meets up with mike, and then forgets everything. i decided not to reference that in all of these stories simply for timing, but in this case, i couldn't really resist. 
> 
> hit me up on tumblr at @how-i-met-your-mulder to see my frequent rants about how long this story is getting. (the next part, bev's part, is already like 10k.)


	4. BEVERLY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She can't leave. She hates this town but she can't fucking leave, not if she's going to forget again, not if they're going to come back so they can save the town, save the kids, keep their promise to Bill and to each other. She can't leave because she can't forget herself, forget the person that she was at thirteen, the person she slowly left behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning up front for references to past child abuse (in the context of bev's dad)

Beverly doesn't remember the majority of her childhood. Almost nothing before age thirteen. 

For years, she does not consider this odd—who the fuck remembers being a little kid? And she knows that her childhood in Maine was not good—doesn't _remember_ it but still knows, can discern a lot from her aunt's pinched faces and the lack of photos of her father (the fact that she can't live with her father in the fucking first place) and and the wave of hate that rises up for the first few years after leaving Derry whenever anyone asks about her parents. Childhood trauma and amnesia go hand and hand, right? 

So Bev grows up and she doesn't think about it, and she doesn't think it's odd. (The closest she ever gets is when her aunt talks about the friends she left behind in Derry, Maine. "Rowdy bunch of boys, they all came to tell you goodbye when we left, remember?" she says more than once. "They called a bunch, too, tied up the phone lines about every night." Bev doesn't remember them at all, doesn't remember ever being friends with boys, and whenever she asks her aunt what _happened_ to the kids, her aunt just says, "Oh, I dunno. You stopped talking to them after a couple years. Figured one of them broke your heart or something." And Bev honestly has no idea.) She doesn't think about it at all until she's twenty-nine and holed up in her Chicago apartment, sketching while sprawled out on the couch, and her aunt calls her to tell her that her father has died. It was quick, she says. He got sick, she says. Bev is under no obligation to go, of course, because her aunt certainly isn't going, but the funeral is on Sunday if she's interested. 

The answer seems obvious: Bev shouldn't go. Her father's an asshole, and she knows this even though she only sort of remembers everything, and she doesn't owe him a goddamn thing. Kay tells her the same thing with the quivering conviction she always has in her voice, and Bev does love her for it, but she knows what her aunt and Kay won't understand: she wants to go because she's curious. She wants to go look on the face of the man who fucked up her childhood badly enough that she has that the State of Maine decided she should live with her aunt. She doesn't remember her mom and probably never will, due to these weird gaps, but she kind of remembers her father and she wants to go. Wants to fill in one goddamn puzzle piece in her muddled mess of a life. Fuck it. She buys a ticket to Bangor, Maine. 

It takes a minute for everything to click into place, for Beverly. It doesn't happen right away—not like when she crosses the town line, or anything like that. But it clicks into place gradually. She parks and walks around town, and memories slowly etch back. There's the Town House where she went to stay with her aunt at thirteen, nervous and shaken and wearing borrowed clothes. There's the park where her mother used to take her to play, before she got sick. There's the movie theater—closed now—where she thinks she might've gotten good at arcade games by playing some loudmouth kid who never brushed his hair. There's the drugstore where she'd secretively bought pads and—her brain wrinkles with confusion here—helped some kids steal a bunch of medical supplies? She passes some tall lighthouse-cylindrical-shaped building called the Standpipe and smiles without even realizing it, and remembers that someone had sent her a postcard, someone had written her a poem. She drives around the outskirts of town, near a quarry and some marshy area, and she starts to remember the friends her aunt always claimed she had. It was a bunch of boys, yeah—Mike and Stan and Eddie and Richie and Ben and Bill. She remembers them in one strange rush and it makes her smile all over again because she thinks that even now, those kids were some of the best friends she ever had. She has no idea how she'd forgotten. 

It all comes screaming back only when she goes back to her old home. Her dad had apparently never moved. The funeral is being thrown by her dad's sister, apparently, a pinched-face woman who Bev remembers disliking and who wants to know where she's _been_ all these years. It's overwhelming to walk back into that musty dark apartment, cramped and dirty and full of the long shadows that had always made her skin crawl. Bev starts remembering her dad, then, her skin crawling and her brain shuttering up, recoiling at the memories, and she excuses herself to the bathroom and locks the door. The bathroom had been something of a refuge for her as a kid, somewhere to hide where her dad wouldn't really disturb, and she feels like a child again, cowering behind the door. She washes her hands in freezing water and splashes her face, and there, leaning over the sink, is where it comes back. The voices from the drain, the chopped-off hair she'd washed down it. The _blood._ The blood that had spurted out, coating her from head to toe, and her father hadn't seen it. Her friends had helped her clean it. Her father chased her in here once, he wanted to hurt her, and she'd… she'd hit him in the head, with the top of the fucking toilet tank, knocked him unconscious so she could run. But she hadn't been able to run. It'd found her then, and It had taken her, the fucking _clown_ … 

Bev turns the water back on so the funeral guests won't hear her retch. She retches several times, though nothing comes up, and stays there for a moment, gasping over the toilet and blinking back tears. They'd tried to kill the clown. Her friends had come to get her and they'd fought it, and they thought they had killed it. But Beverly doesn't think they did. Her hand, clutching the edge of the toilet bowl, is tingling like crazy, almost painfully. She has a scar on that hand. She doesn't remember where it came from. 

As soon as Bev can stand without feeling dizzy, she leaves the viewing without a word to anyone. It's all her father's friends and family, and she doesn't owe them anything. She leaves and drives straight to the Town House, memories piling up in her head as she goes. They'd gone into the sewers. They'd confronted the clown on Neibolt Street, and Eddie had almost died. Bill had cut their hands and made them swear to come back, if It ever came back, to kill It. She'd been caught in the Deadlights, down in the sewers—she had seen them all as adults, had seen them all when they came back. She had looked her older self in the face, had seen everything that happened in the years in between, the place she is in now. She'd seen them all die. 

She had horrible nightmares after she moved to Portland with her aunt, woke up crying or screaming. Her aunt had assumed it was her father, and a lot of it probably was. But the nightmares have continued into adulthood, popping up a few times a year. It's always the same, and Bev has never known who the people in the dreams are. She's always wondered who they are. Now she knows; now she recognizes them as easily as she would recognize herself. It's her friends. It's her friends, and she's seen them all die. For sixteen years, she's watched them all die. 

Bev goes back to her hotel and locks the door and grabs a bottle of tequila from the minibar, which she finishes within a couple hours. By the end of the night, she remembers it all, even the fact that she forgot. She remembers: she'd talked to the Losers every week, all of them fighting over the phone, or some of them individually—Bill, mostly, who she'd considered her boyfriend, or Ben often, who she had pretty much considered her closest friend. (She had stayed with him for a few days after they fought the clown, before her aunt came down. His mom had been sweet, had lent her shampoo and lotion and pajamas that had been three sizes too big. He'd let her have his room, sleeping out on the couch, and they'd stayed up late a lot of nights watching TV in silence, too afraid to go to sleep. He'd written her letters for years, even after she stopped calling.) And then her memories had started to go foggy. Her aunt would ask about her friends, and she would wonder who she was talking about, and then wonder why they talked so much. Once, they all called her, and she couldn't place them. And eventually, she'd just forgotten to call back. She hadn't known there _was_ anyone to call—when she'd first met Kay, at high school in Portland, she'd told her that she was her first real friend. 

She remembers now, and she can't fucking believe she forgot in the first place. It's so fucking improbable, this gap in memory, all the important, traumatic things that were just chiseled out of her head, and Bev doesn't _understand_ it; almost the only thing that makes sense is that it's some kind of supernatural magic. Bev tells herself this when she is drunk on her hotel bed, cradling the bottle in the crook of one arm, but it still makes sense in the morning, when she's sober and has a killer headache and all the memories are still in place. The way they magically snapped into place yesterday. It feels like whatever this is isn't natural. Like something _made_ it happen. 

Bev makes some coffee and takes three Ibuprofen. She gets dressed for her father's funeral—she doesn't really want to go, but it doesn't feel right to not do the thing she came here for. And she calls the airline to cancel her flight later that day. She's still figuring everything out, but she knows she can't leave until she understands all of this. What if something happens to her memory again? She won't risk it. She can't fucking risk it. Bev doesn't know much about how this all works, but she knows that she doesn't want to forget again, doesn't want to lose it all again. So she cancels her flight, and she decides to stay, just for a little while. 

\---

Her father's funeral is strange and awkward. Bev doesn't really talk to anyone, and she gets a lot of weird looks from people that are likely angry she left the service the night before. Her skin crawls all over when she sees her father in the casket; she feels thirteen all over again, shrinking away like a child. He looks smaller than he ever did back then, his hair going gray; there's a scar on his forehead that Bev recognizes from where she hit him. She shivers, gritting her teeth together, and slips out the back door too early to sob behind her hand in her rental car. She doesn't stay for the burial; she doesn't want to. Maybe she'll come back later and leave some flowers for her mom, but she doesn't owe her father a goddamn thing. 

Bev doesn't want to go back to the hotel yet, though, so she walks around town in her funeral dress. She doesn't quite know what she's doing until she goes into Keene's drug store and finds an ancient Mr. Keene and her childhood bully behind the counter, smacking her gum like she's still thirteen. Blessedly, Gretta doesn't recognize Beverly, at least not at first—she gets an expression that says she might've figured it out when Bev starts asking about her friends. It comes to Bev in that moment, of recognizing Gretta Keene and remembering her friends all over again: Gretta never left, so what if some of her other friends never left too? So she asks about all of them, hope in her voice that she immediately tries to stifle. 

Gretta just keeps looking bored. She doesn't know who the hell Bev is talking about when she asks about Ben and Mike, and she has no idea what happened to Richie or Stan or Eddie, but she snorts when Bev asks about Bill. "Oh, you mean _William Denbrough_ ? Big, fancy author?" She jabs a finger at a display of tired looking paperbacks, where Bev sees a ratty copy of some book called _The Attic Room_ that, yeah, has Bill's name on the cover. "Derry's claim to fame or something," Gretta adds with disgust. 

That line of questioning admittedly doesn't get Bev very far—although she had no idea Bill was an author, and buys the book out of curiosity—but it does inspire her to keep trying to figure out if any of them are still here. She spends the rest of the day rattling around town, going by the library and asking Ben and Mike's favorite librarian, asking the new rabbi at the synagogue, the people at the diner her dad used to nurse his hangovers at. She hears a lot of shit about William Denbrough, alternating between adoring and disgusted comments—apparently Bill hasn't been back to Derry in years, and some people disapprove of this. She learns that the Urises moved to Bangor, and Arlene Hanscom left about five years ago, and the Toziers moved out just seven months earlier. The Hanlons' farm is under a new name, and when Bev asks a farmhand, she learns that the whole family left to go seek treatment for Mike's grandfather in Florida. Eddie's mom moved a long time ago, too (Bev can't say this information upsets her very much, considering what they all knew about her). It seems that none of her friends are here anymore, that they all left the town after she did. 

This doesn't do much to dissuade Bev. She goes back to the hotel and spends several hours searching phone numbers or email addresses for her friends. She can't really find anything for Richie, and she has to kind of be content with emailing Bill and leaving a message at Ben's office. (She's taken aback, although not completely surprised, at the fact that both Ben and Bill are semi-famous—Bill as a writer and Ben, apparently, as an up-and-coming architect working for a big firm. It seems improbable—but then again, she's the one who's been considering starting a fashion company of her own for the past couple years. She still might do it, but she suddenly feels uneasy when remembering the man, Tom, who has been offering a loan so she could do just that. She doesn't know why, but she's never felt that way about Tom before now, before Derry. She figures it isn't a good sign.) 

Bev does find Mike, Stan, and Eddie, though. Apparently Stan is an up and coming accountant in Atlanta, and Eddie is working for an insurance company, and Mike is working for the library at a university in Oregon. She finds their work numbers on the organization websites and starts making calls, planning to ask them, _Hey, this is crazy, but it's Beverly Marsh from middle school, do you remember me? Do you happen to remember the demonic clown we fought? That we promised to come back?_ (The question she half-expects to ask and desperately hopes she won't have to ask is, _Do you remember Derry at all?_ )

Bev doesn't get to the questions, though, because Eddie and Mike and Stan don't even recognize her name. Eddie and Stan both think she's a client, and when she brings up knowing them in middle school, they don't seem to know what she's talking about. Stan's pretty polite about it—he says, "I don't remember spending any time with a Beverly Marsh in middle school, although my memory is a little foggy." Eddie seems more impatient, saying something along the lines of, "Look, I don't remember any of my childhood. It's all a huge blur, so I don't know if we knew each other. Are you trying to organize some sort of reunion or something?" Mike seems to be pretty much in the same place as Eddie and Stan. He answers with, "Mike Hanlon speaking," and Bev says, "Hey, Mike, it's Beverly Marsh," without much hope, and Mike says, politely, "I'm sorry, do I know you?" And Bev hangs up abruptly after that, feeling a little sick to her stomach. She doesn't hear back from Bill or Ben at all.

As horrifying as it is to hear the confusion in her old friends' voices, she's a little relieved to find out that she's not alone in this, that she's not the only one who forgot—but what the fuck does that mean for the future? If she leaves again, will she forget again? Will she ever remember any of it? How much will she forget, how easily will she fall into patterns—how easily will she find people like the people who have hurt her? (It's only a hunch, but she has a nervous feeling in her gut that this Tom—that he's like her dad. She doesn't know if it's true, but the idea makes her sick to her stomach.) And if they swore to come back when they were, shit, _forty,_ to kill that fucking clown so it couldn't hurt anyone ever again… how are they going to do that if none of them remember?

Bev feels sick, like she might barf all over again, sprawled out on the bed in her funeral dress that feels too tight now. Her palm is stinging like crazy, the one that Bill cut; she traces the scar with one thumb, like it's an old war wound. 

Bev stands up and paces the room, rubbing her forehead frantically in thought. She can't leave. She hates this town but she can't fucking leave, not if she's going to forget again, not if they're going to come back so they can save the town, save the kids, keep their promise to Bill and to each other. She can't leave because she can't forget _herself_ , forget the person that she was at thirteen, the person she slowly left behind. She doesn't know if that person was the best version of herself, but she knows it's not someone she wants to lose, even if the memories hurt. _I want to run towards something,_ she told Ben when they were kids, _not away._

So that is how Beverly decides to stay: alone in the middle of her hotel room, watching the sun set over the town she used to hate. She's wondering how much she has here, and how much she has in Chicago, and if it's worth it to leave it all behind. She's wondering if she has a choice. She's thinking that she has to stay, because the others didn't, and she has to be the ones to bring them back. So It doesn't happen again. So It can never hurt anyone else again. She has to bring her friends back, and she has to save them, so that it doesn't happen the way it's always happened in her nightmares. She has to do it. She can be brave. 

\---

So Bev stays. 

She starts it all the very next day. She goes back to her father's apartment even though she doesn't want to, picks the lock while it is empty and digs through her old bedroom, pulling out things she remembers, things she misses that her father somehow hasn't touched. Old pictures and things that belonged to her mother, dried flowers she collected when she was little, the scissors she used to chop her hair short. She remembers a postcard she received that summer, when she was thirteen, and retrieves it from its hiding place in the wall. It's yellowing and taped from where her father ripped it, but it's _hers_ , and for a minute, Bev feels the way she did when she first got it. Butterflies in her stomach, throat clogged with happiness. She tucks everything into bags and sneaks it out. 

She calls the company back in Chicago and quits. She still has her designs, and fashion will still be there in eleven years. She calls Kay and her other friends, and her aunt, and she's pretty sure they think she's lost it, but they don't talk her out of it. She looks around for jobs in Derry, and then in Bangor and Hampden, for jobs. She looks at apartment listings, because she can't keep living out of the Town House. And finally, four days after she arrives, Bev flies back to Chicago to settle her lease and collect her things. 

It goes as quickly as it can, but it still takes a few days. Of course. Her landlord is surprisingly amicable, but she still has to pack, and deal with her furniture, and rent a U-Haul trailer, and all that shit. Kay comes and helps her pack, and they both cry a little, and Kay tells Bev that she'd better fucking call and Bev tells her to please come and visit the worst corner of bum-fuck Maine, and then Kay does call her crazy but she hugs her anyway. And then Bev is leaving, to drive back to Derry, and it isn't until she hits the road that she realizes she doesn't remember why the fuck she is going. It's like she's done all this robotically, habitually, but she can't remember why she decided to do this, to cut off her _life_ in Chicago to move to the horrible town where she grew up, and she can't remember what made her decide to do this, can't remember the funeral at _all._

Bev drives for a few hours, dumbfounded, unsure why she's still going but not wanting to turn back. She doesn't have a home, for God's sake. She can't turn up on Kay's doorstep and say, _I went temporarily insane, please take me in_ ; what the fuck? But she can't _go,_ how can she go, she hates Maine, she didn't even like Portland that much, and she had friends and a life and a good job and she was going to start her own company… 

Bev is in Ohio when she's practically steeled herself up to turn around, and then her phone starts ringing. She fumbles blindly for it and answers, assuming it's Kay or her aunt or something, saying, "Hello?" distractedly with her eyes on the road. 

"Hello," an unfamiliar, uncertain voice says on the other end. "Uh, is this Beverly Marsh?"

"Yes," Bev says, keeping her eyes on the road. 

"This is Ben Hanscom, uh, returning your call."

It comes crashing back, just like that. Not all at once, but bits and pieces, she's remembering… Ben. Ben and the other Losers. She called them, they didn't remember, she didn't remember, she forgot again. She's going back to Derry. _Ben._

There's a rest area coming up, so Bev moves to pull off the road, laughing nervously as she goes. "Holy _shit_ ," she says. "Ben. Hi."

"Hi," Ben says, laughing a little, too. He sounds as nervous as she feels. "I'm sorry I took so long to get back, I've been out of town… This is gonna sound nuts, but did we hang out in middle school? I recognized your name, I-I… It's dumb, but I still have this old yearbook page… I think you were the only one to sign it."

The pages were empty. She remembers that. She ran into Ben coming out of the school, listening to music, with a yearbook full of empty pages, and she signed it. If she understood anything, it was loneliness. Bev smiles absently, her forehead resting against the steering wheel. "Yeah, that—that was me. In Derry, right? Derry, Maine?"

"Derry, yeah," says Ben. "God, I haven't been back since high school.” He clears his throat awkwardly on the other end and adds, “It’s good to hear from you! Why, uh, why were you calling, if I can ask?” 

Bev tells a partial truth, staring out the window of her car and chewing absently on her thumbnail. “I went back to Derry for the first time in a long time, and I just… got to remembering things. I thought I’d call some old friends and catch up.” She leans her head against the window and tries desperately to remember names. “Have you talked to any of the guys lately? Bill or Mike, o-or Richie, or any of the others?” She can’t remember any of the others; fuck, that’s why she has to go back. She hates the blank space in her mind as she reaches for names and finds nothing.

“N-no, I haven’t,” Ben says, sounding confused. “Uh, Bill and Mike and Richie… remind me how we know them?” 

Bev barely remembers herself; all she can come up with is, _You built a clubhouse for them. You built a clubhouse for all of us._ “We used to run around with them, I don’t know,” she says, and changes the subject, because she can’t try to tell Ben about the forgetting and… _why_ they forget, she can’t put her finger on it, when her brain is this fucking foggy. “How have you been? What have you been up to?” she asks instead, because it’s easier to listen to Ben talk than to try and pull memories out of thin air. 

She fumbles in her glove compartment while Ben talks and comes up with a bunch of napkins and an ink pen. She scribbles reminders on the napkins frantically— _DON’T FORGET. GO TO DERRY. DON’T TURN AROUND_ —and scatters them all over the seat, the dashboard, everywhere she can see them. She can’t get turned around again. 

Ben still sounds nervous, on the other end of the phone, but he talks about college and moving out to Nebraska and the architecture firm he works for, and Bev finds herself listening even as her mind is racing. It’s strange to hear his voice on the other end, so different than it was sixteen years ago, and she can’t picture how he must look now, but she can’t help smiling a little at his words. This is what she wanted, to find one of her friends and catch up. And even if it just confirms her theory—she grabs a pen and writes _BEN DOESN’T REMEMBER THE OTHERS OR OUR CHILDHOOD (??)_ on another napkin—it’s nice to talk to one of them, anyway. He recognized her name; he called her back because he recognized her name. 

They talk for a while while Bev sits in the rest area parking lot, scribbling down reminders on napkins and pushing back absent smiles. Ben asks her what she’s been up to, of course, and that sets off a whole other conversation, and it’s nice to just catch up, to catch glimpses of the person Ben had turned into. She mostly remembers him at thirteen, shy and sweet and smart, and determined, even when he was scared. She ends the conversation sooner than she wants to, because she wants to keep moving—has to keep going towards Derry, is terrified she’ll forget if she delays it any more—but Ben is amicable about it, tells her to call again if she wants to do more catching up. He gives her his cell phone number, which she adds to the _BEN DOESN’T REMEMBER_ napkin, and ends the call with, “It’s good to hear from you.” He sounds like he actually means it.

Bev saves the number in her phone as BEN HANSCOM WORK and checks the call log a few times to remind herself. Ben’s out there. Ben remembers her, just a little, even if he doesn’t remember the others. She can ask him about the rest later. 

Somewhere in New York, she remembers: Ben wrote her the poem on the postcard. January embers. He told her, once, that he wrote it because she'd thought Bill had, and she’d forgotten. She wants to remember now, though, so she adds it to the napkin and keeps it on the seat beside her until she gets to Derry. 

In Derry, the memories come back, all of them, and it's enough to guarantee that Bev does not regret her decision, to make her incredibly grateful that Ben called when he did. She programs his cell phone number into her phone and tucks the napkins into her purse. 

Bev finds a small house to rent and moves in by herself, lugging furniture and boxes alone because she doesn't have anyone here to help her. It’s only a little bigger than her place in Chicago, but it feels smaller, somehow, the walls restricting on all sides. Bev tries to make it her own, as best she can. She puts pictures on the dinky little refrigerator of her and her aunt when she was a teenager, her and her friends in college, her and Kay posing on the coast of Lake Michigan. (She doesn’t have any pictures of the Losers, and she can't remember if she ever did; aside from the fact that her father was the way he was, and would've been furious if he'd found a picture of her with boys, she can't remember how much she was actually able to take to Portland. She remembers having to borrow clothes from Ben's mom that were too big for her; she remembers a social worker having to pack her bags. She emails her aunt and asks her to send the boxes from her room.) She turns the second bedroom into an office, split between designing and Derry research. (She remembers that Ben researched Derry history a lot when they were kids, and that it helped them figure out things about the clown, but she can barely remember half the things he told them. She figures it’ll be an important part of figuring out what the fuck to do when the clown comes back, if It comes back.) She spreads out souvenirs from her old life around the place and returns the trailer, and tries not to feel lonelier than she's felt in years. 

Bev forgets to call Ben. She realizes this guiltily when she wonders why she hasn't heard from Ben two weeks into her endless Derry isolation, and then realizes that he gave her his number, she's supposed to call _him_ . She calls him immediately, mostly because it's just so fucking lonely in Derry—and also because she legitimately enjoyed talking to Ben. She gets his voicemail and leaves a sheepish message apologizing for getting back to him so late and explaining the recent move (although she doesn't clarify _where_ she's moved). He doesn't call her back.

\---

In the next few years, Bev falls into an odd little routine. She applies to a wedding dress store in Bangor, and they accept, likely because of her sewing skills, and possibly because they are impressed by her resumé. They mention the possibility of her designing some dresses eventually. Bev drives back and forth to Bangor five days a week, and will usually stay a few hours into the evening to get a drink with her coworkers or something like that. (The memories don't really fade over the course of a day, as long as she's back in Derry within twenty-four hours.) She spends weekends at home, usually, drawing or researching Derry history sometimes, or reading or watching movies from the movie rental store Derry has somehow held onto. She drives east a few times a year to Portland, to visit her aunt. She usually tries to make it a day trip, but on the times when she can't—like holidays—she puts notes all over her car and through the folder of half-finished designs, she puts reminders on her phone, and she always tells her aunt, seriously (even though her aunt always laughs it off), "Make sure I go back to Derry." She meets up with Kay and her other friends from Chicago a couple times a year, too, and she can mostly convince them to come stay in Bangor, but once or twice she has to fly back to Chicago. She always tells Kay the same thing that she tells her aunt, and she always goes back, although it is a thousand times harder when she goes to Chicago. She misses the city, even if she doesn't miss forgetting who she is. 

Life is Derry is lonely, lonelier than it ever was in Portland or Chicago. She remembers being lonely when she first got to Portland, missing her friends, but this is a thousand times worse, because she doesn't have her aunt _or_ the Losers, and all her friends live at least twenty minutes away, or further. She tries to make friends in Derry, and some people are nice enough, but the town seems to almost remember her and offers the same rejection it did back then. No one seems to know who Beverly Marsh is—they'll connect her to Alvin Marsh, but they don't connect her with the sickening reputation everyone gave her at thirteen—except for maybe Gretta Keene, but it doesn't matter. She's still alone here just the same. 

Bev tries to find ways to stay connected to the outside world, especially to her friends. She doesn't have any real way to stay connected to the other Losers, since none of them remember her, but surprisingly, most of them pop up in the news in unexpected places. Bill and Ben are still a writer and an architect, of course, and Ben only continues to make headlines as the years go on, but Richie starts appearing in the news as an up-and-coming comedian, and Mike releases a book when they are thirty-three, a nonfiction account of the history of the occult in small-town America. Bev reads the books and watches the comedy and looks at pictures of Ben's buildings and pretends that she knows them the way she used to. It's been so long since she saw all of them, longer than it was for any of them, since she left so soon and forgot so fast. She's remembering the conversations they had after she left, the loud and messy phone conversations, the hushed talks with Bill in the middle of the night, the letters or postcards they all sent (Richie and Eddie sent about four with Derry scenery that read _DON'T FORGET US AND DON'T FORGET DERRY,_ not knowing that she would do just that). Bill had called her a lot, and she'd loved it because he was her first boyfriend—she still smiles a little at the memories, even though she's long moved past her crush on Bill Denbrough—and Ben wrote her the letters that she still has tucked away in a large orange office envelope. She can't remember when she started forgetting to write back. 

She hasn't heard from Ben since that day when she was driving back to Derry, she suspects because he's forgotten. She forgot to call him for a while, and she'd bet that's all it took; she remembers how quickly she forgot when she went back to Chicago to pack, how quickly things get foggy when she leaves for more than a day. She can't fault Ben for it, but she's a little disappointed; it was nice to have someone to talk to about all this. Still, she doesn't expect to hear from him any more than she expects to hear from the others before 2016. It just feels improbable. 

This is her expectation until 2012. By that point, Bev has been living a fairly uneventful life in Derry for seven years, and she doesn't think much of living there anymore. But 2012 feels like a reminder, more jarring than any of the years that came before it, that she only has four years before the clown supposedly comes back, before she has to call everybody and remind them of their promise and tell them to come home. And it might be even sooner. She didn't hang out with the guys when Georgie disappeared, but she did know them, and she remembers it well: Georgie disappeared in 1988, not 1989. A couple other kids did, too. It could come in 2015 instead of 2016; it might happen even sooner. 2012 is like another reminder that Bev is running out of time, and a reminder that she has almost no usable research on the clown. She's gathered research slowly over the past seven years, but life can get unexpectedly busy, and even when it's not, the stuff she's found has been pretty mundane. She hasn't found much of anything on the Ironworks Explosion, or the Black Spot, or the Bradley Gang, or any of the stories Ben told them when they were kids, much less the clown. More of the town burying its deep, dark secrets, she guesses. She'd do anything for the mountains of research Ben seemed to have when they were kids. 

In the middle of 2012, Bev makes a grab at getting back that research: she emails Ben's work email, reintroducing herself (because he won't remember who she is) and asking if he has any idea what books he looked at in 1989 when he did all that Derry research. It's probably a dumb move; who knows if he'll even remember her again, much less if he'll remember what he read when they were thirteen? But Bev does feel desperate at this point, after almost seven years of nothing. And besides that, Derry is still lonely. It hasn't gotten any less lonely in the seven years since she moved here. Maybe if she can get in touch with Ben, and stay in touch, she'll have someone else to talk to, someone who _understands_ this fucking hell hole. Maybe she'll have one of her friends back. She leaves her phone number at the end of the email, just in case. 

Ben responds in two days, calls her again instead of emailing. The beginning of their conversation is a mirror of their first one, with Ben's memories reliably foggy—they do the same we-went-to-middle-school-together dance—before he gradually, faintly remembers their phone call from before and apologizes for never getting back in touch. He doesn't really remember the books he used, he says—he barely remembers the research at first, only mentioning that he remembers a lot of the stories gave him nightmares—but he thinks a librarian was helping him, a lot of the time. And he's pretty sure he went digging through the record room, or through old books meant to stay in the library. Bev remembers he spent a lot of time in the school or at the library during the fight—he signed up for a last minute summer school class. She sat in the library with him sometimes, when Bill was busy and she just couldn't stand being in her apartment anymore. They passed magazines back and forth, and covertly munched on the snacks Ben kept in his backpack. 

In the present, Ben and Bev end up talking for almost three hours without Bev even realizing it. She tells Ben about her move to Derry now, only partially explaining why—she tells him she came back after her father passed and more or less leaves it at that. They talk about their career—Ben's is taking off, while Bev is kind of just sitting still, but she doesn't mind. She likes it where she is. Ben asks about the company she works for, and she says, "You've probably never heard of it, it's really only popular in Maine, but we make several sales online." Ben googles the company and compliments her designs. She searches for pictures of his buildings in return, and mentions that she likes the interview he gave to Atlantic last year. She mentions Richie's comedy and Bill and Mike's books, and Ben clearly has no idea who she's talking about, but he seems to believe her when she swears they used to hang out with them, and mentions checking it all out. She catches him up on what little Derry gossip there is, and he talks about a dog he recently got, a huge shepherd mix named Baxter. When they finally hang up near midnight, because Ben sheepishly says his phone battery is dying, it's with a promise to keep up, to email and text and stuff. "My memory is weird, I dunno," he says, "but I wanna try and dig some of these memories up, remember these other kids you've been talking about." Bev readily agrees, because all she can hear in this is the chance not to be so fucking lonely. 

Bev goes to the library over the weekend. She doesn't recognize the new head librarian, but she's nice, and readily digs into helping Bev search through old records and books, even letting Bev check out some things that aren't technically supposed to be checked out. It's only a start, but within a few hours, Bev is recognizing the stories that Ben told them all those years ago, his voice eager and solemn all at once. She emails him the news that night, recounting some of the stories, and halfway hopes that it will jar some of his memories of the clown. (She figures the whole thing will go easier in four years if she has at least _one_ person in the know.) It doesn't, but he's emailed her back by the next morning just the same. 

\---

Bev spends the next three years researching frantically in every moment that she isn't either at work or out with friends. She goes to the library so often that the librarians keep one of the study rooms reserved for her. Her office at the house is a mishmash of unfinished designs and Bill and Mike's books and early Derry history and supernatural research that probably makes her look crazy. (Mike releases two more books concerning ancient legends and the occult, and Bev scours them for usable details, although she finds none aside from some useless tips on how to ward off evil spirits.) She gets a pretty good timeline started concerning the clown (which actually seems to be some sort of _alien_ that crash-landed in Maine at the beginning of time, what the _fuck_?) and still is unable to find any clear way to fight it. The closest she gets are some old pamphlets that discuss the existence of a turtle god, of all things, and a ritual called the Ritual of Chud. The only recorded performance of it apparently failed, but it's still the best option Bev has found, so she holds onto it. 

She keeps track of her friends, too, preparing for the inevitable phone calls that she will have to make. Stan and Eddie are still where they were when she called years ago, in Atlanta and New York, respectively, and Richie and Bill are both in L.A. now—Bill because of his wife, and Richie because of his career, she assumes. Mike is doing research somewhere in Alaska for a new book, apparently. 

And Ben is still in Nebraska, which she knows for certain without research. She's managed to keep up with Ben. They've kept up a regular communication (not steady, but annual and regular with some effort) between texts and phone calls and emails over the past few years. Ben forgets whenever there is a lapse in communication; Bev learned that when they first emailed for three weeks straight, and then didn't talk for five months. When the communication goes stale, she has to get in touch and remind him of who she is. It always feels strange to do this—Bev feels like she is doing this more for herself than for Ben, and she sometimes wonders if it would be easier on Ben to let him just forget, to avoid the confusion and the muddled way she skirts around the full truth—but she always does it anyway. Talking with Ben is such a natural part of her life now that she doesn't know what she'd do without it. 

Bev still hasn't told him about the clown. She isn't entirely sure how to bring something like that up, and in this case, ignorance is probably bliss. Ben still barely remembers any of the other Losers, and he'd probably think she was insane if she started talking about a clown from outer space who eats children, and who they promised to kill. 

When Bev had decided to stay in Derry, it had seemed like the only logical choice, the only thing to do in the wake of their promise. She can honestly say she wasn't scared of the clown when she decided to stay. She was afraid of forgetting, afraid of who she was when she forgot, afraid of the memories and afraid of her father and, yes, afraid of the town that ate her alive and that she had to stay in despite her fear—but not the clown. She thinks a part of her has clung, all these years, to the thirteen-year-old version of her, who looked the monster in the eyes and told It she wasn't afraid. 

But she _was_ afraid. She was afraid as a child, although maybe not in that moment, and she's afraid now. She gets more and more afraid every day she gets closer to the point where they will have to fight this monster again. Afraid of what it does to people, to children, afraid of what it will do to her, and afraid of what it will do to her friends. She still has nightmares about her friends dying. She never stopped. And they only seem to increase in intensity as the years go on. 

Beverly holds onto that childhood bravery that seems a little silly now, all these years later—like the version of yourself who looks back at the stuff you did as a kid, and thinks with a wiser mind, _What the fuck was I thinking?_ She was stupidly brave back then, like they all were. (It wasn't just Bill, it was all of them, all of her friends who were terrified to fight the clown and screamed at Bill when he insisted they had to keep going, and who went down into the sewers to save her anyways, and stayed down there to save Bill.) They were braver back then and Bev thinks if they can hold onto that bravery now, they'll win. So she tries to be brave, even all these years later, but it's hard at times. She wakes up in tears in the middle of the night sometimes, wakes up screaming with the names of her friends who she hasn't seen in years rolling off her tongue even though they aren't there. She is so scared that her friends will die when she calls them back; she is terrified that she won't be able to save them. She considers telling Ben the whole story about a million times when they're talking in the middle of the night, Ben's voice soft with sleepiness on the other end; she thinks about telling him to save himself, and then hanging up and never talking to him again. She's considered fighting this thing alone about a dozen times. She would do it if she didn't really believe that they're stronger together. 

She misses them all so much. She has Ben, sort of, and she is beyond grateful for Ben, but she misses the others so much it hurts sometimes. Her childhood best friends, the first _real_ friends it feels like she ever had. She remembers wanting to leave Derry so badly as a child, and yet not wanting to leave when her aunt came because it would mean leaving all of them behind. Now she's trapped here, a rat in its maze, the town suffocating her from every end, but she can't leave—for so many reasons, but because if she left, she would never get to see any of them again. They're supposed to remember, to come back together; she's sure it's supposed to happen this way. Sometimes, she even thinks that the others might remember, just a little. Sometimes, she'll tell a story to Ben over the phone and the things he says don't sound completely confused and inauthentic, and she can almost believe that he really remembers them all for a second. Sometimes she'll watch Richie's comedy (which is admittedly kind of horrible, he was way funnier as a kid), and he'll tell a story from childhood with all the details skewed, different players in a different place, but it's just close enough to something Bev remembers actually happening. She sees familiar details in Bill's books, of Georgie or his parents or them or the clown, but it's especially familiar in his most popular book, _The Black Rapids,_ starring a cast of sweet, stupidly brave middle schoolers. The details are as skewed as Richie's comedy, sure, and there are certainly liberties taken, but sometimes Bev will reread it and smile absently, think, _That's us._ She keeps a picture of all of them, one she actually found tucked in the bottom of the boxes from her aunt's house, up on the fridge. It'd been a present from Mike. It's the seven of them in the clubhouse, hands scrambling to hold the camera out as far as possible in a lopsided predecessor to the selfie. It's blurry and dark and angled strangely, and Bev loves it with all of her heart. 

She has to bring them back. She doesn't have a choice. So she keeps researching and gathering information, keeps trying to figure out how to kill the goddamn clown, because they have to kill it this time and make sure it's dead. She doesn't know what they'll do if they can't. 

\---

Six months before 2016, Bev gets a call from Ben in the middle of the night. It's not the oddest thing in the world—they've talked in the middle of the night plenty of times—but Bev knows that something is wrong as soon as she picks up the phone. She can hear it in Ben's voice. 

They exchange a few pleasantries before he says it, his voice thick with awkward, apologetic seriousness. He says, "Bev, this is gonna sound nuts, but I… I gotta know, uh… why do I keep forgetting you?"

Bev bites down on her lower lip too hard and turns her face into the pillow, unsure if she's afraid or relieved, unsure of what the fuck to even _say._ Ben is still talking on the other end, saying, "I-I forgot that we talked back in 2005, and it… it always slips my mind to get in touch with you when we haven't talked for a few days… I can barely remember Derry, or our other friends, or any of the stories you've told me… I feel like I'm going nuts, and I… I wondered if maybe you'd… know what I meant, or experienced any of the same things." 

Bev rubs a hand over her face and says immediately, "Ben, you're gonna think _I'm_ nuts, but… I think if you're free, you should come to Derry. I can explain this better in person. And… I think things will make a lot more sense once you're here."

Ben agrees immediately, so quickly that Bev knows he must be horribly shaken by the whole thing. She can understand. She picks him up at the Bangor airport the next morning and engulfs him in a hug as soon as she sees him, thinking for no reason at all of being thirteen and sitting on the couch with Ben watching late night TV, taking his hand when he left it sitting nervously on the cushions between them because she wanted the comfort. He's grown up, gotten tall since she left, but he grins when he sees her, his cheeks and neck going red, and she knows him immediately. 

Ben doesn't prod, which Bev is a little relieved about, because she doesn't want to try and explain things without the context of actually being _in_ Derry. They make small talk on the ride back to Derry; Ben has new pictures of Baxter and a new project to talk about. Bev doesn't have much to offer, mostly because nearly everything she's been doing besides work nowadays has to do with the clown, and she can't explain that without context. So she waits, letting Ben talk quietly and growing more and more nervous as they grow closer to Derry. 

She can tell it's starting when they cross the town line because Ben goes quiet. Bev can see his jaw clenching as he leans forward and puts his face in his hands. They don't say anything until they get back to Bev's house, pulling up into the driveway. Bev throws the car into Park and turns to look at Ben. His face is still in his hands. "Are you okay?" she asks softly. 

Ben lifts his head to look at her, his expression unreadable, his eyes wet. "Holy shit," he says. "Bev, holy _shit_." Bev reaches out abruptly to grab his hand in hers, and he gives her a lopsided, wobbly smile. 

\---

"I can't believe you _stayed_ when you came back," Ben says, after they've cleared everything up. They're on the couch she bought for her office, her research scattered all over the floor, and he looks a little bit like he's been hit by a truck. Bev remembers the feeling. "You… left your whole life behind?"

"I felt like I didn't have a choice," says Bev. "Forgetting like that, and then remembering… I didn't want to forget all of this again." She looks down at her hands, her bitten nails. She made herself quit nail biting at age twelve, soaked her hands in lemon juice every day until she stopped, and then picked it back up again in her late teenage years because she had forgotten she broke the habit. "I felt like it was… better to remember," she quietly adds. "Like _I_ was better when I remembered. And then I remembered the promise that we made when we were kids, to come back if It ever did, and I… I wanted to make sure that someone was here to bring us all back."

"I can't believe…" Ben laughs a little and says, "Do you remember what I said to you when we were kids? Right before Bill and Richie thought, when you said that the clown would come back in twenty-seven years?"

" _I'll be forty and far away from here,_ " Bev says, one corner of her mouth turning upwards. "And it came true."

"And you said you wanted to run towards something and not away," says Ben. 

"This wasn't what I meant," Bev says dryly. She'd almost forgotten she said that. She had meant it, at the time, but she's spent the years since running away. 

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner," she adds. "I called you and the other guys hoping that you might remember, and none of you did… You were the only one who responded, and I could tell you didn't remember, and I didn't want to overwhelm you."

"Bev, it's okay, really. I can't say I _missed_ remembering that thing, Jesus… I'm just sorry you've had to carry this all this time." 

"In a way, I sort of wanted to do it." Bev swallows roughly, says, "I know it sounds insane, but I didn't want to lose all those memories, even the rough ones. And I figured someone should stay if none of us remembered, to call us all back… It might as well have been me, right? I'm the reason you all went down into the sewers in the first place."

Ben immediately shakes his head. "Don't be ridiculous, Bev. We were _always_ going to get you out of there, there wasn't a question about it. And you would've done it for any of us."

"I would've," Bev says, because she would have. And she will all over again, when the time comes. 

Ben must be thinking the same thing that she is, because the next thing he says is, "How long do we have? Before we have to fight it again?"

"I don't know," says Bev. "2016 will mark the twenty-seven years, but who can know for sure? Kids started disappearing in 1988 last time. It could technically start any day now." She looks down at her hands again, balls one into a loose fist. "But… I don't think it's happening yet," she adds. "I haven't… felt anything yet, if that makes sense."

"It does," says Ben. "And it does feel a little early. I don't know. It hasn't been twenty-seven years yet." He opens his palm, the one that Bill cut, and traces his scar with an absent fingertip. 

Bev is overly aware of her own scar, tingling between her closed fingers. "I'm not sure how the others will react, when I call them back," she admits. "They don't remember anything right now, but when they do… I don't know if I'll be able to convince them to come back, and I don't know if I can blame them. We all almost _died_ last time, and none of us… none of us even _wanted_ to fight the clown, aside from me and Bill, and so much has happened since then."

"Of course we're going to come back," Ben says, so serious and sure of himself that it surprises Bev. "We promised, remember? We swore."

"We did swear." Bev smiles a little. It had been so serious and ceremonial, like playing at religious rituals. They all seem so young now, so small, too much on their shoulders. She feels protective of them now, that little gaggle of misfit kids who felt like they had to save the world. 

"I called everyone when I came back," she adds. "You were the only one who recognized me. Everyone else either didn't get back to me or didn't have any idea who I was." 

"I'm glad I held onto that yearbook page, weird as it sounds," Ben says sheepishly. "And I'm glad that you called. I spent so much time wondering who Beverly Marsh was… I'm glad that I know, now."

"I am, too, New Kid," Bev says, poking his arm lightly. "It's ridiculously lonely here. It was nice to have someone to talk to, who kind of knew what was going on, you know?"

"I do know," Ben says quietly. They grin a little at each other on her couch, stuck in the marvel of both remembering and being here, the town where they met, where they grew up. 

Ben stays for three days, sleeping on Bev's couch. They walk around town in an absent attempt to relive the _better_ parts of childhood, swapping stories about the other guys. They find his clubhouse under a layer of underbrush, mud, and leaves. They go through the boxes from Bev's aunt's house. Bev pulls out the postcard Ben sent her, and he blushes like crazy and brushes it off like, "I was so embarrassed about that, Bev, seriously," and she says, "Come on, New Kid, it was sweet." They spend the days catching up, and when it's time for Ben to fly home, he's reluctant to go. "I should stay," he says. "You shouldn't have to deal with this alone, Bev, it's too much."

"You have a life to get back to, Ben. You want to leave poor Baxter alone in Nebraska?" Ben chuckles a little. Bev adds gently, "You should go back, okay? Derry will still be here in six months, or however long it will be before I have to call everyone back."

Ben agrees, although he clearly hates to, but he makes Bev promise to keep in touch. "I don't want to forget again, not completely," he says. 

"I'll call you," Bev promises. "If I call you frequently enough, you might not forget as much." Ben thanks her, his face a little red again, and all she can say is, "Of course." She doesn't want to lose him, even if it's just for six months. 

She drives Ben to the airport and kisses him in short-term parking, leaning across the center console. He kisses her back tentatively but sweetly, one hand cupping her cheek gently. She watches him go from the car for as long as the airport employees will allow, and pretends her stomach isn't knotting painfully. She already misses him by the time she gets home.

\---

Ben and Bev talk nearly every day. They can't do it every single day, because they are both busy with work (and Bev with researching the clown), but they find time. It's the best part of Bev's days at this point, talking to Ben.

The months between Ben's visit and the clown's return are messy. Bev doesn't expect anything to happen any differently, but that doesn't make it any easier. The town seems to grow hollow, eerie and darker. The wind howls outside her windows every night. Strange sounds come from the sewers when Bev walks from the car to her house. Her nightmares increase in intensity and in quantity as the days go by, until she's having them nearly every night. And five months into 2016, a kid goes missing. One month later, another one is gone. 

Bev knows it's time when Adrian Mellon is killed. She wasn't sure until then, which she feels horrible about, but she knows it's really the clown when Adrian dies. She didn't know Adrian or his boyfriend well, but they'd talked a few times in bars or at restaurants, and she liked them. She hears about the crime and it's like a spike under the ribs, the same way all of these deaths are, the kids that have gone missing this year. But she isn't sure whether or not the clown is involved until she goes down to the bridge and sees where he died. The huge words scrawled on the underside of the bridge, meant for her: _COME HOME._ So she has to call them then. 

Bev cries when she gets home, for Adrian and Don and for the kids who have already been lost, and for Betty Ripsom and Ed Corcoran and Georgie Denbrough and all the other kids, and her friends. She still sees them die, almost every night now. She doesn't want to bring them back and she doesn't want to do this again, but she can't let this keep happening. They promised. They swore. Bill had cut her palm because of what she said. She'd seen them as adults, the way they are now, their hands linked in the cistern, held together even all those years later. 

She can't call Stan. She knows this, that she can't call Stan. In the visions where the others die, they all die in Derry, and she doesn't know how much of this will happen (she hopes none of it), but she knows this: Stan won't die in Derry, because Stan never makes it to Derry, every single time. So she can't call Stan, at least not yet. She'll wait until all of them are here, and then she'll call, or she'll wait until the clown is dead, or _something_. She can't risk Stan, so she does not call him. She calls Bill first, then Mike, then Richie, then Eddie, then Ben. She calls Ben last, of course, and it takes a minute for everything to snap into place, but all she has to say is, "It's time," and things do snap into place, and he says immediately, "I'll be there." The others agree, too, by some miracle, although some of them certainly take it better than others; Eddie crashes his car in the middle of their car, which shakes Bev more than she ever would've imagined. But they all agree to come, leaving Bev stuck somewhere between nervous joy and outright fear—she is eager to see them, but she halfway wants to tell them not to come, the nightmares still stuck on her head in an endless loop. 

Ben ends up offering to fly down to Atlanta and talk to Stan. "I can fill him in on things, maybe call you and have you explain," he says. "I think… maybe if one of us is there, he won't… he'll know everything is okay."

"I would avoid calling him at all, but I'm not sure we can do this without him," says Bev. "I think Bill was right, when he said we were stronger together. Lucky Seven, you know? I think that's the way we all make it out, if we do it together." She chews on her thumbnail, staring out her window. It's raining outside, raining hard, and she can nearly hear the water burbling through the sewers. She winces. "Thank you, Ben," she adds softly. "I really appreciate you going out of your way like that. I don't… know how I'd do this without you." 

"I'm glad to do it, Bev," Ben replies, just as softly. "I mean… Stan is my friend, too, and I don't want anything to happen to him, either. To _any_ of you. And I… I've really missed you all these years." 

Bev blushes a little, putting her hand over her mouth. "I've missed you, too, New Kid," she says, leaning her head against the window. She shuts her eyes a little. "Do you… do you remember the day I left for Portland? What you said to me?"

"Only a little," Ben confesses. "My brain is still a little foggy, you know."

"You gave me a hug, and you told me that I was your best friend," says Bev. "You said I'd always be your best friend." She remembers that day, how happy it'd made her because nobody had ever said that to her before—not even Bill, or Richie, or any of the other Losers. She loved them and they loved her, but none of them had ever called her their best friend, except for Ben on that hot morning in 1989. 

"Oh, yeah," Ben says reflectively, quietly. "I meant it, you know."

"Well, I never said it back. But I want to." She chews her lower lip and smiles, just a little. "You're my best friend, too, Ben Hanscom."

When Ben finally answers, his voice is a little thick. "You're still mine, you know," he says, and Bev laughs. If she has nothing else at the end of this, not her friends or her life or the chance to start over, she is glad she still has Ben. That she’s had this time with Ben, a small chance to ward off loneliness in this shithole of a town. 

She spends the next day preparing, unsure if she’s doing what actually needs to be done or just stumbling blindly, but unwilling to go in unprepared. She makes a reservation at Jade of the Orient, which is pretty much the only place in Derry worth having a reunion at. (There are other good restaurants, but none that nice, and none with the advantage of privacy.) She gathers the messy research she’s done in the past four years and tries to gather it into a cohesive timeline to present to the others. She doesn’t go to sleep, because she doesn’t think she could stand to sleep with the nightmares in the picture (and besides, she’s had a hard time sleeping this whole year, out of fear that the clown will kill her in her sleep), and she tries not to linger over every small worry that she has about the whole thing. Her friends dying, or hating her for bringing them back, or not showing up at all. The idea that she might be disconnected from all of them in the first place. She left after only a few months of hanging out with them all, and they had the rest of high school—Ben told her that Bill moved to Brunswick midway through high school, but he still came back to visit his dad over holidays and the summer. What if that creates even worse of a disconnect, the fact that she hasn’t seen any of them in years? She doesn’t want to consider the possibility that it would. 

They arrive gradually, that next night, and they look so different from the way Bev remembers, but she still knows them immediately. They're all a little foggy when they arrive, but then Bill smiles the way he used to, and Mike engulfs her in a hug, and Eddie is offering nervous grins and listing his allergies to the waitress, and Richie bangs the gong in the back of the restaurant and starts cracking jokes all over again. Bev has never felt more at home in Derry. 

The dinner starts amazing. Bev can't remember the last time she's laughed like this. They fall into their old habits, joking and arguing like they're thirteen again. It doesn't feel entirely complete without Stan and Ben here, but it's still amazing, a reunion twenty-seven years in the making. Bev can tell they don't entirely remember what they're doing here, and she honestly dreads the point where she has to tell them. 

It comes more abruptly than she expects, when they start asking where Ben and Stan are, and she gives them a tentative explanation that understandably freaks them out. She thinks they are considering leaving, breaking their promise, leaving the whole thing behind, when Stan and Ben walk in the back. Stan is a little pale but he's _there,_ he's alive, and Ben's got a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

Relief watches over Bev as she meets Ben's eyes, as she gets to her feet to hug Stan tight, as the others get up to greet them. They're a little broken, caught in the net of their broken childhood, but they're all alive and they're all together, and that seems to be all that matters. It's like what Bill used to tell them all when they were kids. _We're stronger together._ He used to say, _If we stick together, all of us, we'll win._

Crowded in there with all of them in that room, bunching together in an odd, impromptu group hug, Bev thinks that she really believes that. She really believes they can win. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this diverges from the timeline of lighthouse keeper in that bev's dad dies earlier than he did in LK. i was originally going to have it be the same timeline, and everything was the same except for bev coming back and mike not being there. but then i realized that i had bev already married to tom when her dad died in LK, and i really didn't wanna write tom. so i had bev's dad die earlier. 
> 
> i took some mild liberties with bev's past, since i'm pretty sure the plot of bev living with her aunt wasn't in the book. i am not sure when bev and kay met, but i liked the idea of them being old friends too. 
> 
> ben originally wasn't supposed to be in this so heavily, but when i had the idea of bev calling her old friends to see if they remembered, i realized that ben would recognize her name from the yearbook page and it kind of spiraled from there. i wanted to make sure that bev was still alone in derry, but i liked the chance to write ben and bev reconnecting. i wanted to include baxter in this badly but i couldn't figure out how to get him to derry realistically. 
> 
> hit me up on tumblr! @how-i-met-your-mulder


	5. RICHIE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie will tell anyone who listens (will likely tell Bill someday, that courageous motherfucker) that he did not stay for the clown. Absolutely fucking not. He never wanted to fight the thing in the first place! He stayed for extenuating circumstances, and he mostly forgot about the clown and the promise they made as kids. Trauma repression, his therapist would probably say, or some shit like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry this chapter took such a long time. it was ridiculously hard to get through, for some reason. (i have no idea why, since i spent 80k in richie's head for midnights. i also don't know how it got this long.) 
> 
> warning up front for internalized homophobia, and also some abandonment issues (in the context of everyone forgetting).

It's the nightmares about Richie's nieces and nephew in the Derry sewers that almost does him in. He has spent forty goddamn years of his life in fucking Derry, Maine, and he's wanted to leave that whole time, but he still never really comes  _ close  _ to leaving until he starts dreaming that the clown comes after his family. (He's used to It threatening his friends, even though that shit hits real fucking close to home, but this is all new territory.)

Richie will tell anyone who listens (will likely tell Bill someday, that courageous motherfucker) that he did  _ not  _ stay for the clown. Absolutely fucking not. He never wanted to fight the thing in the first place! He stayed for extenuating circumstances, and he mostly forgot about the clown and the promise they made as kids. Trauma repression, his therapist would probably say, or some shit like that. He honestly fucking forgot (although not in the way all his friends have forgotten; thank you, evil clown motherfucker) until he started having horrible nightmares and weird, stinging palms in the middle of the night. And then he dreams about his sister's kids stumbling around blindly in the sewers of Derry, and, well, that is very nearly the end of it. He packs the car, he calls his sister when he's somewhere between drunk and hysterical and tells her not to bring the kids to Derry ever again (they're only a couple towns over, it isn't far enough, it isn't fucking far enough), he's ready to up and leave in the middle of the night. It’s seven months into 2016, and he’s sick of this shit. Fuck the promise they made when they were dumb, stupidly brave kids, and fuck the clown for fucking with him. Fuck  _ himself _ , for staying in this stupid town so fucking long, for deciding to stay in the first place. He’d told his friends for years that he was leaving Derry the day after graduation for years. (When he and the guys were ten, they had an insane plan to run away on the bus and start a new life, and even though it is, quite literally, insane, there are times when Richie wishes they’d gone through with it. Followed Bev to Portland like she suggested. Gone on the lam. Sounds better than forty fucking years in this town.)

Richie is ready to leave, like he should have a long time ago, but the nightmares get worse. More crazed, laughing clown voices, giant Paul Bunyans chasing him, his friends screaming and running in danger, children crying. Voices screaming, “ _ Come home, Richie! Bring them home, bring them home! _ ” to him. (Not just in his dreams, but during the day; when he’s driving home from work in the middle of the night, or coming up from the drain, or floating out of his car radio or static-y television, or whispering outside the windows.) It’s the voices, first, urging him to call his friends home—which Richie has no intention of doing, because mixed in with his obvious clown-induced nightmares is ones about his friends dying, the nightmares he’s been having since Eddie broke his arm, and Stan and Ben were attacked, and Mike was almost killed by Bowers, and Bev was clown-napped, and the clown tried to trade their lives for Bill so he could eat him. He doesn’t want to die and he doesn’t want his friends to die, and he won’t call them back for that. He’s planning to leave, he’s ignoring his sister’s texts, he’s avoiding sleep so he doesn’t have to dream about his sister’s kids and his friends and the clown and all of that shit, he is fucking doing it. He's going.

But then he can’t. He freezes up the day he’s supposed to leave, because someone has put up a poster for one of the kids who went missing recently. Two weeks ago. It’s in color, not black-and-white, and is very clearly homemade, but it throws Richie right back into his childhood, of that room in Neibolt where the clown left a Missing Poster with his face on it, and he’d about hyperventilated from fear while Bill talked him down. Back into the fall of 1988, of his mom’s solemn voice when she said, “Georgie Denbrough is missing,” and Bill in tears and trying to hide it, dragging them on wild searches every day after school, as late as they could stay. (Richie’s parents were always the most lenient, so he always stayed longer than Eddie or Stan could, wandering through the streets with Bill in the dark, with their stupid little plastic flashlights, calling Georgie’s name. It’d been a fucking punch to the gut when Georgie had disappeared, no matter what Richie would tell Bill months later that lead to him punching Richie in the face. Georgie was kind of all of their little brother. He followed them everywhere, he reserved a certain kind of hero worship for the three of them that he really only reserved for Bill. It had scared the shit out of Richie when he disappeared, and it still scares him to this day. Still makes him  _ sad _ . He loved that kid.)

Now, twenty-seven fucking years later, Richie stares at that poster and can’t stop thinking about Georgie, Betty Ripsom, Ed Corcoran and his little brother. Every other fucking kid who fell victim to the clown and got the whole thing pinned on Henry Bowers. And he knows he can’t leave after that. Not just yet. “Fuck,” he hisses, and slams the trunk to his car shut, and storms back into the house, and punches the wall.

The first two kids put some cracks in Richie’s foundation, but it’s Adrian Mellon who eventually makes him stay. Adrian Mellon, who Richie fucking  _ knew _ —he knew his boyfriend better, since Don was from Derry, but he’d run into them several times, hung out with them in bars and shit, even though it left him looking over his shoulders a lot. (He hates that it left him looking over his shoulders a lot. Adrian and Don wanted to get out of Derry, too.) Richie knew Adrian Mellon and Adrian Mellon dies, in the exact same way Richie’s always had nightmares about dying—first some fucking home-bred homophobes got the whole thing started, and then the clown finished him off. First the town, then the clown. 

Richie throws up when he hears about it, hunched over his sink, pretending he isn’t crying. First the town, then the clown. It killed Adrian because of him, clearly, It is still trying to send him a message because he didn’t listen before. He goes down to the crime scene, against his better judgement, hands shaking in his pockets the whole time, and finds the rest of the message under the bridge, the same thing he’s been saying all along. _ COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME. _ Adrian’s asthma inhaler floats up on the banks of the river, nudging against Richie’s shoe, and Richie throws up all over again. 

So he has to call then. He doesn’t have a choice. People will keep dying if he keeps doing this, and it’ll be because of him. And as much as he doesn’t want to bring everyone back, he doesn’t think he has a choice. 

Richie digs into the Internet to find his friends. Some of them are fucking famous, of all things, Bill with his writer career and movie star wife, and Bev with her fashion empire, and Ben with his buildings. He has to dig to find their numbers, but if there’s one thing that Richie has gotten good at over the years, it’s snooping. It’s easier to find numbers for Eddie and Stan and Mike, who are apparently bigshots in their own careers, but notably less famous than the others. Stan is in Atlanta, accounting, and Mike is teaching in New Orleans, and Eddie is risk analyzing (which Richie finds slightly hilarious, but whatever). He writes out their numbers meticulously, makes a list of all the people he hasn't spoken to in twenty-seven years and their phone numbers, and calls them all to come back and fight the evil demon-murder-clown that almost killed them all at age thirteen. 

He starts with Big Bill, cause fucking obviously. Bill answers the phone with a nervous little, "Hello?" like he knows why Richie is calling. 

Richie says, "Big Bill! It's Trashmouth Tozier. I'm calling to remind you of the shittiest blood pact of our lives. Ring any bells?"

There's a long silence on the other end before Bill says, "Who is this?"

Richie sighs, one hand over his face. He knows about the forgetting, but that doesn't make it any less irritating, make it hurt any less. "It's Richie. Richie Tozier. Listen, we promised thirteen years ago to come back if It ever came back." His scar starts stinging like crazy, but he ignores it. "It's time to make good on that promise, Big Bill."

\---

Richie wasn't  _ supposed  _ to stay. 

Which is a stupid observation, because none of them were  _ supposed  _ to stay. But Richie  _ really _ wasn't supposed to stay. Aside from hating Derry with a fiery passion, Richie had gotten several offers from several schools by the end of senior year. One out in  _ L.A. _ , even. It was, quite literally, Richie's wildest dreams come true, even if L.A. was far away from every single other school the guys were applying to. Who cares? It wasn't like he could follow Bill or Eddie or any of the rest of them off to college, clinging to the back of their shirts like they were in grade school again. It was time, he told them all one night, to make his own way in the world. (Which they all rolled their eyes at, but that's what they were all doing, wasn't it?)

So the plan was to go off to college, right up until the point where Richie's mom lost her job. Got fired in a big wave of corporate layoffs (the bastards, his father always added). And his father's dentistry practice certainly wasn't failing, but it had been waning a bit ever since a new practice opened up, and his sister was already in college… They never came right out and told Richie that he couldn't go to college, but the fact that they couldn't afford to pay tuition for two kids was there, laid right out on the table. Richie could see it every night in his parents' goddamn apologetic eyes. 

So he wouldn't go, he decided. He wouldn't fucking go. He was an asshole, but he couldn't put his parents in debt—not when they were practically Parents of the Year compared to one of his friends' families. He'd get a job or two in Derry, and he'd save his money, and maybe when his mom found another job they could try again. 

It was hard as shit to sit back and watch the others leave. Richie can't deny that even now. Hard as shit to help them pack up their stuff, divide up all the stuff from their childhood, to accept that childhood was really ending and they were all leaving. It was hard enough to watch Bev leave when they were thirteen, even harder to lose Bill for most of the year a few years later. Richie didn't know what he'd do without the rest of them. 

The closer they got to the date of their inevitable separation, the more the others seemed to realize that they  _ were  _ actually separating. They were all huge weepy messes by the time they reached their last night the six of them would spend together. They were all over at Richie's that night—they would've gone out to Mike's and spent the night in the barn, generally their favorite summertime sleepover spot, but Mike's grandparents had sold the farm in preparation to go seek out treatment in Portland. Mike was flying down to Florida the next morning, and Bill was headed back to Brunswick before he flew out to Indiana in a couple days. Stan and Ben and Eddie would all leave within the week. 

They were all quiet that night—an unusual feat for Richie, but one he couldn't help, because to be a loudmouth would require talking and he didn't think he could talk without crying. Everyone else was about in the same place—Ben was caught in a spiral of reminiscencing, and Stan had a solemn, stony look on his face all night, and Bill fell into that reassuring, poetic shit from when they were thirteen, and Mike kept looking around like he wanted to remember everything, even though he wouldn't. Richie just leaned on Eddie and offered up some pathetic jokes and tried not to think about if Eddie was leaning back. And in the morning, they got up at the crack of dawn and hugged Mike and Bill goodbye and watched them drive off. The way Stan and Ben would drive off in a few days. 

Eddie was the last to leave, and this was because Mrs. K, consistently competing for her Shittiest Mother of All Time Award, refused to drive him to New York. She pitched a fit every goddamn time he brought it up. He was over at Richie's house every day that week practically tearing his hair out with anxiety over the whole stupid thing. Richie finally got fucking fed up over the whole thing and drove Eddie to the bus depot to buy a ticket. “You’ve gotta fucking get out of here, Eds,” he’d said, poking him a few times in the shoulder while Eddie hung back nervously in the ticket line. “You’re  _ moving into _ your goddamn dorm room in two days, you’re just gonna leave it empty? Leave your roommate to cry all night because of how lonely he is?”

“My roommate probably wouldn’t even like me,” Eddie had said, nervously, but he was eyeing the prices listed across the top of the little booth in a way that made Richie sure that he wanted to do it.

“Fuck that, Eds-o, you’re amazing and your roommate will know that.” Richie shoved him forward a little, not too hard. “Now go buy the fucking ticket before I buy it for you.”

So Eddie bought the ticket, and Richie drove him to the bus stop two days later because Mrs. K still refused to do it. He’d felt a little sick as soon as Eddie paid for the ticket, because it was confirmation that Eddie was really leaving and that he was going to be alone in Derry, but he kept telling himself to buck the fuck up and take it because Eddie needed to get out of Derry even more than Richie did.  _ Obviously _ . Part of him considered the benefit of Eddie staying, probably because it’d still cause Mrs. K a shitload in tuition costs even if Eddie didn't go, and Richie liked the idea of her floundering around with that. But mostly it was because he didn’t want to be alone. He squashed the idea of Eddie staying, though, because he knew Eddie needed to get out. They all did. And when the time was right, Richie would get out, too. Maybe follow Eddie and Stan the Man to New York, because he needed someone to bug the shit out of, right?

In the front seat of Richie’s car, when they were parked by the bus stop, Eddie embraced Richie before he got out of the car and didn’t let go for a long time. (So long that the center console started to hurt Richie where he was hunched over it, but who was complaining? He didn’t want to let go, either.) “I’m gonna miss you, dickhead,” Eddie said quietly before letting go, avoiding Richie’s eyes like he was embarrassed. 

Richie swallowed hard and shot back, “I’m gonna miss you, too, Spaghetti. But at least I’ll have Mrs. K’s sweet, sweet loving to comfort m—” He dodged Eddie’s predictable swat, cackling like crazy so he wouldn’t cry again. 

“You’re such an asshole,” Eddie grumbled with no real heat behind it, dodging Richie right back when he tried to muss up Eddie’s hair. “Write me, okay?” he added, one hand on the door handle, finally looking back at Richie with emotion so clear on his face that it actually hurt. 

“Only if you write me,” said Richie, unable to make a joke. There was a huge lump in his throat, and he knew he was gonna cry as soon as Eddie got out of the car. “Or call, or something. Send a fucking carrier pigeon."

“Definitely,” Eddie said, and he lurched forward to hug Richie again, briefly this time. “And I’ll see you over Thanksgiving.”

“You know it, Eds. We’ll have the four month Loser’s Club reunion,” said Richie, more jovial than he felt. For some weird-ass reason, it felt like he was never gonna see any of them again. 

Eddie actually opened the door this time, although he looked back over his shoulder at Richie like he didn’t want to leave. “Later, Rich,” he said, his voice softer than Richie had ever heard it.

Richie considered for one wild moment asking Eddie to stay. But he couldn’t do that, so the only thing he said was, “Later, Eds.”

Eddie slid out of the car and walked to the bus stop, stopping only to grab his bags from the back. Richie pulled away from the curb as soon as Eddie reached the little cover thing, because it didn’t feel right to linger. 

He made it all the way home before he cried, which was an incredible feat. And the pathetic thing was, looking back, Richie didn’t even  _ know _ then that they’d all forget. It took him months to realize that he wasn’t seeing them again, when nobody ever called him, or wrote letters, or sent postcards, or any shit like that. When nobody came back for Christmas because the Urises moved to Bangor, and Mrs. K went nuts and moved to New Jersey to be close to Eddie, and Ben’s mom went to Nebraska for the holidays, and Mike’s grandparents didn’t come back, and Bill didn’t visit his dad for either of the holidays. It wasn’t until Christmas that it really hit Richie that he was alone. 

\---

Richie tries not to sound like the World's Most Pathetic Little Boy in his recounting of this shit. It was his decision to stay, literally over and over again. He could've left at any point during the twenty-two years since he turned eighteen, and he never did, even after his mom got another job. It kept making sense to stay. He started attending community college in Bangor (infinitely more affordable). He manned the desk at his dad's office to make some extra cash, until he finally got a job at the Derry Radio Station. He kept getting promoted at the Derry Radio Station, and while it wasn't exactly Hollywood or any of Richie's childhood dreams, it was better than nothing. 

And his family was in Derry, too. His parents actually stayed, which was kind of a surprise to all of them, and after his sister got married, she moved back to Hampden to be close to them all. ("I can't do Derry, Rich," she confessed once. "Derry freaks me the fuck out. I don't know how you do it.") So it just made sense to stay. Richie may have spent most of his childhood trying to get out of the house, but he did love his parents and sister, and he appreciated the chance to be around them more and more the older he got. (And the chance to be the fun uncle.) So, no, he did  _ not  _ stay for the fucking clown, and although he had a lot of fleeting moments over the years when he wanted to leave because he was going out of his mind with loneliness, he didn't leave for several reasons. As much as he hates Derry, he did have a few fleeting reasons to stay. 

Not that it was a picnic being left behind. He's made a few friends in the years since, even dated a little (very secretively, and very rarely for very long), but it's never been the same as it was before the guys left. Of course it wasn't the same; Richie can still remember when they were kids, they'd say shit like that all the time, get all emotional and say,  _ I've never had friends like you guys before,  _ or  _ You're the best friends I've ever had.  _ And it was true. The group had never quite been the same after Bev left, and Ben and Mike are some of the best guys he's ever known, and Stan and Bill and Eddie have been part of his life since fucking  _ kindergarten…  _ Of course it'd feel like losing a limb when they left. And when they never called or wrote or visited, any of them. 

(That still stung, even though Richie knew why now. It still hurt like hell. That after all the promises from everyone to call and write and visit, nobody did. It had hurt worse right after, when Richie was still an aimless teenager with no hopes and nothing to do all day but write down dentist appointments. What a fucking life. He'd cried more than he'll ever admit, let his mind run wild with claims like,  _ They all secretly hate me  _ or  _ They found out what I was and now they're glad to be rid of me  _ or  _ Of course they won't fucking call, they've probably met people who aren't such little dickheads.  _ He wouldn't tell anybody about that part, because it's embarrassing, but he still has visceral memories of how alone he felt.)

Stan is the next-to-last one that Richie calls in 2016, and he actually remembers the moment when Richie figured out about the forgetting. (It'd been when he called Stan about a year after they all left, figuring that Stan was probably the least embarrassing option. He'd known Stan longer than Mike and Ben, and he didn't know how to contact them, anyways; he didn't have a massive fucking crush on Stan, and Stan had never slugged him in the face. [Which was likely unfair to Bill and Richie knew it, but it was accurate.] Richie called Stan at his parents' new house in Bangor at the end of the summer, one year from their ultimate separation, and held his breath right up until Mrs. Uris put Stan on the phone and he said, "Hello?"

Richie had let out his breath with a whoosh and said loudly, "Stancakes! Thank God. I was starting to think you assholes evaporated into thin air." He was only kind of kidding.

There was a lengthy silence on the other end, and then Stan said, "Who is this?" in a sharp voice. 

Something like fear and anger all at once rose in Richie's throat. "It's… it's me," he said in a small voice. "Richie."

"Richie who?" Stan said. And Richie hadn't listened any further, just slammed the phone down and held his breath so he wouldn't cry or scream, stunned by the betrayal of one of his oldest friends, the kid who wouldn't do the monkey bars in kindergarten but prodded Richie to try them until he fell off and scraped both knees, who then bent in the mulch beside him and patted his back in sympathy.)

That was his first encounter with the forgetting, when Stan didn't know who he was, even though Richie hadn't understood it until much later. And Stan  _ remembers _ it. Richie can hear it in his voice, over the phone, when it goes all high in the middle of their conversation. "Richie, Richie, shit," he says, interrupting Richie, his voice frantic. "You called me, didn't you? R-right after we left… after I'd been at college a year, you called…"

"Yes indeedio," Richie says in a dumb Voice. He grimaces a little and adds, "Yeah, th-that was me. I didn't know about the forgetting thing yet."

"Shit, Rich, I'm sorry." Stan's voice is tight on the other end. He sounds scared, terrified, and Richie remembers Stan shouting at Bill that he was insane, about two minutes before the fight. He was terrified of the clown, he had to be coaxed into going into Neibolt; Richie should not have fucking called him back. 

"You didn't know," says Richie, his throat tight. He thinks,  _ Hey, Stan-man, I don't wanna do this either, if that makes ya feel any better. The clown is twisting my arm!  _

Stan takes a sharp breath and says, "You want me to come back." It isn't a question. 

Richie laughs bitterly behind one hand. "Shit, Stanley, I don't want anyone to come back," he says. "I almost fucking split when I realized the clown had come back. You don't know how badly I don't want to do this."

"But we have to," Stan replies, grimly, sounding like a prisoner being led to execution. "We swore. We have to do it."

Richie shuts his eyes. "We don't… I don't think we  _ have  _ to do anything. I don't know that…" He winces. "I think we should. I don't know, we just… we promised. And I think Bill and Bev were right twenty-seven years ago. You remember all that shit they said about how no one else was going to do anything about It?"

"I remember," says Stan. His voice is shaking on the other end, and when he speaks again, it's in a whisper. "I… I don't know if I can come back, Richie. I don't fucking think I can do it. I can't do it."

"Fuck, Stan, I'm not gonna  _ make  _ you," says Richie, shaking his head and pretending he doesn't want to cry, just a little. "I won't… We'll miss the shit outta you, Stancakes, but I'm not gonna make you come. No way." He laughs shakily. "You'll come to our funerals, right? When we all die?"

"Beep beep, Richie," Stan says, laughing muffedly. Or maybe crying. " _ Fuck. _ " 

"No pressure, Stan-man," Richie adds. "Seriously. The blood pact shit is  _ bullshit _ , I told Big Bill so when I called him. Fuck this. I just had the bad luck of hanging back in this shithole and remembering it all, so the clown is bugging me. It shoulda been Bill, huh?"

"Beep beep," Stan says again, thickly. "Shit. I'll… I'll see you, Richie, okay?"

"Okay," Richie says. "Okay, Stan, buddy, I'll see you." And he has no fucking idea if Stan means, like, in a few weeks or whatever, if any of them will even  _ survive  _ long enough to see Stan. But whatever the case, Stan walks right into the restaurant the next day, rubbing his wrists anxiously, his face pale with fear, shooting Richie odd looks mixed with gratefulness and anxiousness. He shows up. 

\---

"I can't believe you  _ stayed _ , Rich," Bev tells Richie later that evening, back at the Town House. They came there after everything went to shit at the restaurant—exploding fortune cookies and all, what the  _ fuck _ —because Mike suggested research into figuring out how to kill the fucking clown. So that's what he and Ben and Bill are in the midst of doing, books and shit spread out all over the floor of Mike's room—who knew the Derry library was open this late? (Okay, Richie browses the library for new William Denbroughs, or even new Mike Hanlons—his historical research books—pretty often. But never at  _ night _ .) Meanwhile, he and Eds and Bev and Stan are sprawled out on the other end of the room, still drinking a little, mostly wallowing in the fear and the panic that is choking them all. (At least, this is how Richie sees it.) 

"Hey, fuck, that is weird. You always wanted to get out of here more than anybody," Eddie adds, shoving lightly at one shoulder. They might be a little drunk, and Eddie's voice is high with excitement or fear or alcohol or all of the above. He tried to arm wrestle Richie at dinner, shouted,  _ Let's take off our shirts and kiss!  _ right there. "You went on and on…  _ I hate this shithole, it fucking sucks! _ Even with the gap year, I woulda… I thought you'd be out of here sooner."

Richie tries very hard not to think about being that dumbass kid who thought about following Eddie to New York. "Things just kept lining up," he tells them, taking another swig of vodka so he doesn't have to think too hard about any of this. "I guess? The rest of the Tozier clan gathers here. I didn't really want to leave once I'd figured the forgetting bullshit out." He waves a hand wildly for emphasis. "And I kinda… had nightmares whenever I thought about leaving. Fucking clown, right?"

He's not sure if that description is too dramatic or is sugarcoating the whole thing—it only  _ really _ got bad once. He never connected the horrible nightmares he'd have the night after thinking about or joking about leaving, to the actual  _ thought _ of leaving until the one time that he almost actually left. He thought about it a lot, but it never was really real till then. He had made peace with forgetting when he was in his early thirties—what's the point of remembering your childhood with the best friends in the world if they don't remember it? And he'd gotten a job offer from a radio station in Boston, and he was sure he'd be back in Derry plenty of times for holidays and shit, so he might be able to remember pretty often. It had really made perfect sense to leave; he'd sent in confirmation on the job, and had started looking for reasonably priced places in Boston. 

And then the nightmares started back up, worse than before. Shit like his car smashed on the town line, blood on the windows; TV headlines about drinking himself to death or about getting stabbed in a bar. Henry Bowers's voice, older and more gravelly, in whatever place they had him locked up in; maniacal laughter that Richie hadn't connected to the clown until just then. People screaming slurs at him, closing in on him from all sides. He saw his own death, all outside of Derry, topped with about a million other horrible things (his own friends dead, somehow), and it was enough to stop him from moving, make him email that station in Boston and apologize and resign. It made no fucking sense, Richie had told himself a million times since, because Derry was the  _ problem,  _ Derry was the prison where he would eventually die. The outside world couldn't be worse than Derry. But the nightmares always told him otherwise, and they always stopped as soon as he decided to stay. So he stayed because the nightmares seemed worse than everything else. 

And besides, he really wasn't that keen on forgetting, no matter what he said. Thirty missing years of your life never fucking sounds like a good idea. And aside from not really knowing how much the forgetting shit worked—would he forget, like, major parts of his personality if he left, would he forget his family?—he didn't want to forget his friends. Even if all he had left was memories. 

Eddie kind of stares at Richie weird after he says that shut about the nightmares, although Stan and Bev don't seem phased—Bev nods emphatically like she knows what he is talking about, and Stan grabs the bottle from Richie as if to finish it off. But Eddie is looking at him kinda like he's crazy. 

They used to talk about leaving, him and Eddie, a hell of a lot of the time before the actual time came; there was the plan with Bill and Stan when they were ten, and then there was the plan they'd came up with in the eighth grade, still reeling from the clown and nutso Mrs. K and Eddie's broken arm and Bowers being a serial killer and Bev leaving and… There were plenty of reasons to want to leave. And they'd both known they weren't  _ really  _ going anywhere, but one night when Eddie was at Richie's—the first time in months, since the night after the clown, and Richie still couldn't believe that Mrs. K had given permission for a sleepover—they spent the whole night pretending they were. Planning this insane trip to Canada, talking about it like it was really gonna happen. Saving out of their allowance and catching a bus up there and building some fort in the woods to hide while Mrs. K looked for Eddie, like something of  _ Hatchet _ , or possibly hiding out on some island up there, living off of fish and rainwater… It'd been nuts and dumb, and never once did either of them mention inviting the other guys along. It was just for them. That's what Richie thinks about when Eddie looks at him all weird: being sprawled out on top of his made bed and planning to run away while he pretended he really, really didn't want to grab Eddie's hand. 

He changes the subject, then, geniusly, by asking Stan about his wife, and the conversation moves somewhere else and somewhere else, until Mike announces that they've found some ritual that might be worth a try and motions them over, and that's it. Hey, Richie is open to solutions, as long as it'll end this shit. It's not like he has any clear solutions himself. 

\---

The time Richie tried to contact Stan wasn't the end of it. He tried two more times a couple months later, with Bill and Ben and Mike, because Bill had been his friend forfuckingever, fight aside—they had swore to let it go back when everyone started hanging out again (spit swore in fact, which they'd been doing for years whenever the two of them made a pact because Eddie and Stan thought it was disgusting). And because Ben was the sweetest asshole Richie knew, and because Mike was also pretty damn nice, and he figured they wouldn't pretend not to know him. He figured he would start with them and then go to Eddie as a last resort—he figured just because Stan had abandoned him didn't mean that all the others had. He figured that was a good order, even though he really  _ did _ want to talk to Eddie; he didn't think he could take it if Eddie pretended he didn't know him. 

He didn't get that far, because Bill and Ben didn't know who he was, either, and it was fucking excrutiating. He ended up having to email Mike cause he couldn't find a phone number and he never heard back, but Ben and Bill straight up didn't remember him. Bill seemed real fucking confused and said he didn't know a Richie, and Ben was all like, "Do we have a class together?" and Richie hung up on both of them cause he couldn't take it. (And maybe he cried a little. Fucking maybe. Maybe it felt like a punch to the gut, like a slow removal of his fucking ribs.)

It's kind of ridiculous that Richie didn't figure out the forgetting thing then, but he really didn't. The clown thing didn't even cross his mind—he thinks he did a hell of a fucking good job repressing it. (Better than he better repressing the  _ wanting to kiss other guys _ thing.) He figured it out gradually, when he would leave Derry for a few days at a time and his memory would get all foggy. His family didn't really take long vacations then—they were still trying to save for Richie to go to college—but they'd go away for a couple nights to a cabin or something, or go visit his sister at school, and Richie's brain would go all muddled, like someone had dropped it into a fucking  _ blender.  _ But he didn't put the pieces together until his sister's wedding when he was twenty-six. It was a destination thing in fucking Haiwaii, and he ended up hanging around for a while after it was over because when the fuck did he ever get to do anything like that? And he forgot it all just like that, so fucking easy—the clown, the town, half his Voices, half his childhood, his  _ friends _ . And then it all hit him again as soon as he reentered Derry. Motherfucking bricks. Vomiting on the side of the road. And he absolutely could not understand it. 

That was when Richie started putting the pieces together. The weird calls with Stan and Bill and Ben, everyone forgetting to call and write when they'd  _ swore _ . His own weird ass brain. The super weird way that Bill would act when he came back for the summers, and the way that Bev just stopped talking to them. The way she acted like she  _ didn't know who they were _ when they would call, towards the end. 

So, yeah. It started to make sense. He didn't know if it happened to everyone—his sister always looked at him like he was nuts when he would try and hint around the forgetting, but then again, his sister rarely came to Derry when she didn't have to. But it was definitely happening to him and his friends. That couldn't be denied. And even though it didn't stop Richie from considering leaving, he'd be lying if he said it didn't play a role in making him stay. It freaked him the fuck out, that it was happening and he didn't know  _ why _ , cause he had repressed all the clown memories. He loathed that blank space in his friends' voices, though, that they didn't know who he was, that they  _ forgot _ him. He didn't want that to happen to him. He  _ doesn't  _ want that to happen to him, especially not now, when they're here and they're happy to see him and they're all together… 

It sucked staying in Derry, of course. Even with his family. There was the whole few-friends thing, and the fact that a little town in Maine was probably never gonna love his impressions, even those who still listened to the radio (no fucking chance of making it big, obviously), and the fact that after forty years in the town there was  _ still  _ absolutely nowhere to eat. Fucking nowhere! He's been sick of all the best places for years. The most exciting the whole town has gotten is a fucking Starbucks. Nowhere to eat, nowhere to go, nothing to do. He's too old to swim in the quarry or ride bikes down the steepest hill in town, and besides that, it'd be lame to do that shit alone. And on top of that, staying in this fucking pit has pretty much guaranteed that Richie has never really gone on the fucking "journey of self acceptance" that most people like him have gone on. 

(It took thirty-plus years for him to be able to say the word in his mind, acknowledge that he's gay. And he still has not said it out loud to anyone. The closest he's come to anything like that was the nine month relationship he had with a guy he met who worked over at the radio in Hampden, and it ended up going nowhere, possibly cause he buried the whole thing under about fifteen fucking lies. Jesus Christ. He's moved away from that kid who had nightmares about Bowers screaming at him in the middle of the arcade, or about literally any of his friends finding out who that  _ R+E  _ was for, but especially Eddie. He's moved away, but that kid is still in there somewhere, and Richie isn't sure when he'll shake that off.)

He's spent years, by the way, telling himself that he's over Eddie Kapsbrak. Who's still hung up over the person they were in love with in middle school? (Apologies to Haystack. The guy holds a mean candle, and it's cute, but he's clearly the outlier.) Richie has tried to talk himself out of this stupid fucking infatuation a million times, particularly in the years when he thought Eddie had ditched him like all the others. And as of recently, Richie had almost believed he'd done it. But then Eddie fucking  _ If-I-eat-a-cashew-I-could-realistically-die  _ Kaspbrak waltzed into Jade of the Orient and it felt like somebody literally threw him back into every wild, nervous, idiotic, lovesick feeling he'd ever had as a kid. Or like someone threw him into concrete. (Not much of a difference, as far as Richie's concerned. Still feels like he's broken some bones.)

Eddie's been there as long as Richie can remember. He's the one who freaked the fuck out when Richie fell off the monkey bars in kindergarten. He had Scooby Doo band-aids in his pocket. He's the one who gave Richie the fucking  _ idea  _ to carve their names into the Kissing Bridge. He suggested they do like a  _ We were here  _ thing when they were hanging out there one day, and Richie had made a stupid fucking joke about what people would think, and Eddie turned all red and never brought it up again. And Richie had kicked himself so much over that, had felt like an asshole and an idiot and a coward, that he'd snuck back over during the fight and carved their initials there and wished to be in literally any other world where Mrs. K didn't hate his guts and a clown hadn't almost killed Eddie and they could  _ really _ like each other without it being wrong.

Eddie is the last one Richie tried to get in touch with, before he called them all back for the Clown Killing Palooza. It's probably a pretty pathetic story, but it goes like this: It happened before the whole Boston fiasco, back when Richie was still a bright-eyed kid who thought he could leave without having horrible nightmares and forgetting half his life and having to come back and die to fulfill a stupid promise he made when he was thirteen and delusional. He'd been thirty-one at the time, and he babysat for his sister a lot, and they sat around talking after she came home with the kids all conked out on the floor. And she asked him when the fuck he was gonna get out of Derry. And he said, "Hey, dumbass, you ended up back here," and she said, "I'm in  _ Hampden,  _ asshole. And besides, you have  _ dreams,  _ remember? Aspirations outside of radio, which no one even listens to anymore?" Like he was an idiot. Big sisters.

It was the closest he came to leaving before the Boston shit. He went home and got all nostalgic, flipped through the movies on TV and came across an old sleepover classic from when the guys were still there, and thought about leaving and how much he missed them all, even if they didn't remember him and/or didn't care about him anymore. He got all moony and dug up the copies he had of Bill's books—his favorite was  _ The Black Rapids,  _ because all the kids in that were pretty obvious, if unknowing, stand-ins for the Losers (the Bill stand-in was the fucking hero there, too), but he liked the werewolf one as much as he could without going down a path of werewolf-related-metaphor trauama. (He had a lot of affection for the hypochondriac kid who spends half the book at the doctor's convinced he's turning into a werewolf, even if it did make him wanna kick Bill's ass for some reason.) He went through old pictures of all of them and pretended he wasn't getting weepy and sappy—the wine probably didn't help. He had old nerdy papers of Ben's and Mike's, and a short story Bill wrote in ninth grade (about a murder and missing body parts, of fucking course), and Stan's binoculars, somehow, and old comics that he and Eddie had shared custody of. (There was one where they kept scribbling each other's names out, to the point where the cover was ripped a little, and Mike had gotten exhausted and wrote,  _ This belongs to Richie AND Eddie, they share it, now knock it the fuck off!!! _ ) The joke book his friends had gotten him for his fourteenth birthday, with all their names signed on the front page—even Bev's, somehow, they'd mailed it down to Portland so she could sign it. And at the bottom, a picture of the New York skyline ripped from a magazine, captioned with  _ STAN AND EDDIE THIS FALL!  _ in Eddie's handwriting that always bordered on the line between neat and haphazard depending on his moods. There were little stick figures (drawn by eighteen-year-old Richie, obviously) meant to be Stan and Eddie climbing the Empire State Building, both with their hands stuck out shooting New York the finger.

And that was when Richie got choked up, thinking about the schools he'd almost applied to in New York before chickening out—thinking,  _ Eds won't want me following him to New York _ —and the way he'd used to think he might go to New York when money got better. 

And then Richie had thought, very stupidly,  _ Well, why fucking can't I?  _ He had a degree. He had radio experience, even if radio popularity seemed to be waning more and more every day, obviously. Why  _ shouldn't _ he go to New York?

Amazingly enough, the whole thing still made sense the next morning, fucking somehow. Enough sense that Richie decided to fucking  _ call Eddie in New York.  _ Just to see. Like he'd gone a little crazy and thought that maybe, just  _ maybe _ , Eddie would've been spared the forgetting shit somehow. Richie doesn't know what the fuck he was thinking now, but it seemed rational then. He did some digging that morning and found the number to Eddie's office, and dialed without thinking. 

Eddie answered the phone with this dignified little, "Edward Kaspbrak speaking," that about bowled Richie. It was hilarious, obviously, but also kind of overwhelming. Here was Eddie, all grown up. Richie couldn't even picture what he looked like now; all he could see was that kid who hugged him goodbye in his car and said he'd see him at Thanksgiving. 

"Eds!" he'd blurted, unable to stop himself. "It's Richie."

There was a horribly long silence on the other end before Eddie said, too politely, "I'm sorry, Richie who?"

It was like a punch to the fucking guy. Richie thought he was gonna throw up, and he couldn't fucking find the wherewithal to offer his last name. He just put his forehead against his window, swallowed back nausea, and said miserably, "We went to school together. In Derry."

"Derry…" There was an uncertain trail in Eddie's voice, like he was trying to place it. "Look," he added, somewhere between apologetic and irritated. "I don't remember very much of my childhood. I'm really sorry."

Richie laughed bitterly, his eyes shut, thinking of the sharp feeling of rejection from all his other friends who forgot, even though they couldn't help it. Of clenching his hand into a fist to keep it from reaching out and taking Eddie's. Like he couldn't  _ control  _ it, like he shouldn't want it. "Who the fuck does?" he said bitterly. 

Eddie sounded confused when he spoke again. "I'm sorry, I don't… Is there some kind of reunion?"

"Fuck no," snapped Richie, his mouth twisting into a grimace. There had been one a couple years ago, actually, but no one from the Loser's Club had showed, making it an entire waste of time, and miserable on top of that. "No way, Eds-o. I just called to say hi." And then he hung up, any thought of New York crushed like a goddamn bug. 

Pathetic on top of pathetic-er. And a contributor to Richie's mental You Are Not In Love With Eddie Kaspbrak Anymore lectures. (Except he might be. He still might be. He really still might be.)

Richie ends up sleeping at the Town House with the rest of the Losers that first night, because he doesn't really want to go back to his rattly little apartment. There's some performative proclamations about heading back to people's rooms, but it goes nowhere because they all end up falling asleep on the beds on top of Mike's research, and Richie's kind of eternally grateful because he doesn't wanna play the Who Am I Shacking Up With game. That's a fun one when your self-esteem is at rock bottom. 

He ends up between Bev and Mike, lying lengthwise across one bed, but that doesn't actually separate him from Eddie, who is on Mike's other side, poking regretfully at his eternally buzzing phone. He falls asleep before Richie though, and Richie rolls over to stare at the other wall, his teeth clenched, silently giving himself the lecture he first started composing at age eleven. 

\---

According to Mike, for the Ritual, they need to collect sacrifices. (Not small, Eddie-sized sacrifices.) So Richie heads out to search for some significant childhood token to destroy to kill the clown. That's a nice symbolic thing in the process of leaving your cursed childhood home, right? What the  _ shit _ . 

He wanders aimlessly around town for a little while, has a pants-shitting encounter with the fucking clown, before he ends up back at his own place, because that's probably where he'll find the best childhood stuff—in the boxes of mementos he keeps with creative labels like  _ Fetus Years!!  _ and  _ Little Shit, Esquire  _ and  _ PUBERTY!!!!! _ He finds a sacrifice and heads back to the Town House, and walks straight into a situation out of about ten childhood nightmares, and also straight out of 1989. 

Mike's arm is bleeding behind a cloth napkin Bev's got pressed to the wound, and Ben's apparently on the phone with the cops. Henry Bowers is sprawled out on the floor, blood pooling under his head, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. 

Richie feels something like bile rise up in his throat, and he blurts, "Jesus fucking Christ! Mikey, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Mike says with a wince. "Thanks to Ben."

"You were handling him pretty well yourself," says Ben gingerly as he hangs up the phone. He's smiling tensely, but his face is white. 

"We were worried you might have run into Bowers, too," Bev adds grimly. "We're still not sure where Bill is, he just ran out." 

"Where's Eddie?" Richie says abruptly, suddenly realizing that Eddie isn't down there. There are some splotches of blood on Bev's shirt that he can't take his eyes off of. 

"He's upstairs, he ran into Bowers first… Shit, I meant to go back up and check on him," says Bev, guiltily wincing. 

"I'll go," says Richie immediately, grateful for the chance to get away from Bowers and his blank eyes, and unable to stop picturing all the shit that  _ He ran into Bowers first _ might mean. It's insane to think that Eddie might be  _ bleeding out  _ upstairs, because Bev and Ben are down here helping Mike and they wouldn't have abandoned Eddie if he was dying or anything, but Richie can't stop lingering over that idea, can't stop picturing the worst as he stumbles up the stairs and bursts into Eddie's room. 

The first thing he sees is the shirt Eddie was wearing earlier, crumpled in the bed with a pretty considerable amount of blood on the collar. His throat tightens immediately, and he bellows, "Eds!" as he spins around and scans the room. 

There's some splotches of blood on the floor, too, but no sign of Eddie, and Richie is about to descend straight into panic when the bathroom door opens and Eddie emerges redressed, gripping a wet cloth that he's using to dab blood off his cheek, which seems to be the source of blood; there's a pretty noticeable cut in the middle, like Bowers  _ stabbed him in the face _ . "Holy fucking shit," Richie gasps out between clenched teeth; he's gonna have a fucking heart attack. "Holy shit, Eds, are you okay?"

"I'm not great, considering Bowers stabbed me in the fucking face!" Eddie says, his voice rising as if in hysteria. He presses down hard on the wound with the cloth. "I-is everything okay downstairs?" he adds, wavering. "I heard shouting…"

"You and Mikey can start a Stabbed By Bowers Club," says Richie. "Actually, Ben, too, remember how Bowers fucked him up when we were kids?" He shakes his head wildly, rambling, frantic. "Anyways, Bowers is done-zo, Bill is off somewhere, and Benners called the cops. Think we're done with this fucking psycho childhood bully shit, huh?"

"Now we've just got the clown to deal with," says Eddie grimly. He motions spastically at the bathroom, where Richie can see a First Aid kit opened messily on the counter. "Can you, uh…" His face scrunches a little. "I can't really get the bandage on right."

Richie's stomach turns. All he can picture right now is Eddie's face after he'd tried to set his arm, stupid fucking kid who thought he could do shit like that just so he could make Eddie feel better, and it hadn't helped at all. It'd just hurt him instead. "Sure fuckin' thing, Spaghetti," he says, swallowing hard. "Sit on down." 

Eddie sits on the closed toilet seat and Richie digs through the kit until he finds a little square bandage thingy. "I probably need stitches," Eddie says under his breath, still wiping at his cut despite the dwindling blood. There are still spots of blood on his neck that he clearly missed. 

"We can take you to the emergency room, Eds," Richie says quietly, avoiding his eyes. "If you need stitches…" 

"No, no, we need to get this over with," Eddie says through gritted teeth. If Richie looks at the slit in his cheek, he can actually kind of  _ see  _ his teeth, and it makes him wanna throw up. "Assuming we don't fucking die in the sewers, I can get it checked out then." 

"That's the spirit!" Richie says, more spiritedly than he feels. He presses the little bandage gingerly over the cut and tapes it down, unable to meet Eddie's eyes. This shit was always Eddie's job when they were kids, patching them up. Fuckin' Dr. K. And there's a reason he was always doing it instead of Trashmouth Tozier; Richie can still hear him screeching,  _ Do not fucking touch me! _ right before he snapped his arm into place. He swallows hard and says, "Seriously, Eds, are you okay? There's blood fucking  _ everywhere,  _ is that your blood on Bev's shirt down there?"

"Yep, yep, don't  _ talk _ about it, okay?" Eddie says queasily. Richie clumsily tries to pat the bandage down, half expecting Eddie to yank away, but he doesn't move. He just groans a little and says, "I hate this fucking town, Rich. Less than twenty-four hours and I've already been stabbed in the fucking  _ face  _ and got vomited on by a leper."

"Vomited on by a leper? What the fuck?" Richie's still kind of crouching in front of Eddie on the floor, but the bandage is in place, so he pulls his hand away. He isn't sure what to do with them, so he just kind of lets them hang there. 

"Fucking clown." He shakes his head. "Christ, Rich, I don't know how you've stayed here this long, this place is a pit."

"You're telling me. Of course, the only real reason I stayed was sweet, sweet Mrs. K to keep me company…"

"You fucking asshole, haven't you ever written a new joke in forty years?" Eddie grumbles, but he doesn't seem upset. Richie shoves his glasses up on his face, flexing his hands nervously, and then Eddie looks right at him, his forehead wrinkling like he's trying to remember something. "You… did you call me?" he says faintly. "Like nine years ago?"

Richie tries not to wince, the back of his neck turning red. "Yeah, that was me," he says, offering a clumsy pat to Eddie's knee. "Thought I'd see how much you remembered, ya know." 

Eddie does wince, just a little. “Shit. Shit, Richie, I had no idea.”

“Yeah, cause of the evil clown alien demon that had a gridlock on your memory, dumbass. It wasn’t your fault,” Richie says, shaking his head as he gets to his feet. "Fuckin' forget it, Eds-o."

"I… It stuck with me, you know? After you called… I kept wondering  _ why _ you had called." Eddie's staring at the floor. "Like I thought I  _ should  _ remember you, even though I didn't."

Richie swallows hard, his palms damp with sweat. "Memory of my sweet, smooth voice stuck with ya?" he says dryly. 

"No, you fucking dumbass." Eddie rolls his eyes when he looks back up at him. "I just… I think I missed you."

"You didn't  _ remember _ me, shithead," says Richie. 

"Fuck that. I missed you anyway," Eddie snaps. 

Their eyes meet, tentatively, and Richie's chest feels tight. Eddie's looking at him with such raw sincerity on his face that it hurts. He says softly, honestly, "Missed you, too, Eds."

There's a knock on the door, and Bev speaks on the other end. "Are you guys okay?"

"Peachy keen, Marsh!" Richie calls out, looking to the door in a relieved hurry. He can't look at Eddie's huge fucking doe eyes, not when he wants to bear-hug him and movie-kiss him and fight off Henry Bowers (who is no longer living, shit) all at once. 

"We're gonna try and find Bill after we're done with the cops," she says. "Eddie, I think they want to talk to you."

Eddie grimaces and calls back, "Sure." 

He gets to his feet, and Richie offers a hand to help steady him, eyes still fixed on the door. "Let's get this over with," he says grimly. Eddie shoots him a look, leaning on him just a little too long before they leave the bathroom. 

\---

So the Loser's Club of 1989 finally kills the fucking clown. It's twenty-seven years too late, but it's still a pretty good track record, if you ask Richie. One dead clown demon, seven living traumatized adults. The fact that they all make it out alive seems worth mentioning. 

They very nearly didn't. They get split up in the chamber and Richie gets thrown into a delightful little horrifying vision of the extra years he's spent in Derry. Then he promptly gets trapped in the Deadlights after escaping said vision. Lovely little fucking bonus. He gets trapped in the Deadlights and they show him Eddie dying. Eddie saving him and leaning over him in giddy delight, Eddie get skewered like a fucking kebab. Eddie bleeding out. The others having to drag Richie away screaming and fighting. Eddie getting buried under miles of crumbling rubble and sewage. 

This is what Richie sees, and when he opens his eyes to see Eddie still leaning over him, he doesn't think; he just grabs Eddie and rolls them to the side, just barely missing the long, swinging arc of the clown's fucking claw. Inches away from their death. Eddie yelps when Richie flips them over, either from startled pain or from fear, and Richie clings to him for a moment too long after they land, his fingers digging into the fabric of Eddie's hoodie. He can feel Eddie's heart pounding between them, strong and rapid, and it feels so unreal when he was dead just a minute before, he was dead, Richie was never gonna see him again…

He clings to Eddie, swallowing back frantic tears, and he thinks Eddie clings back, until the claw draws back for another sharp swing and Mike bellows at them to move. They bully the clown to death and they don't leave Eddie under the pieces of Neibolt, and they all make it out alive. 

\---

"What the fuck, dude?" Eddie declares when he finally sees the inside of Richie's apartment. "It looks like you've already moved out."

It's still looking a little bare from the period of time when Richie very genuinely believed he would be leaving Derry immediately. Richie didn't even bother unpacking, just unloaded all his boxes in the storage room and left them there. He'd figured he sure as shit wouldn't be sticking around after Clown Killing Palooza 2K16. 

"What, Eds, you don't like my home decor?" he replies, pretending to be insulted and avoiding meeting Eddie's eyes. It's still hard for him to meet Eddie's eyes after everything that happened in the cistern; he still looks at Eddie and sees his Deadlights vision, the spike through his torso, the blood dripping from between his lips, and he wants to throw up, or grab Eddie in a tight hug and never let go. 

"You  _ have _ no home decor, Rich, you've got empty walls and half-empty rooms," Eddie says furiously, waving a wild hand at the walls. 

"Are they half empty or half  _ full _ ? That's very pessimistic of you, Spaghetti," says Richie, flopping down on the couch. When Eddie shoots him a skeptical look, he adds with defeat, quietly, "I almost left Derry. Before I, you know… called you guys back."

Eddie's eyes widen, maybe not in astonishment but in understanding. "Oh," he says simply, and he collapses on the couch beside Richie. 

It's been a few days since the clown died, and most of the Loser's Club has vacated Derry already. Bill and Stan have wives to get back to, and Ben and Bev left together, seeking refuge from Bev's husband or from the town or both.  _ Definitely _ seeking a divorce. Mike's still around—he's offered Richie refuge at his place in Virginia, where he runs an unsurprisingly successful bookstore, since he's probably got the least complicated situation out of all of them. But he's out visiting his parents' and his grandfather's graves right now. (That's what seemed to shake Mike the most, forgetting how his parents died—same as Bill and Georgie.) 

Eddie, meanwhile, has made no mention of going back to New York, which might have something to do with the call he made to his wife the night they killed the clown, wherein Richie suspects he asked for a divorce. (Although he won't ask, won't let him hope for anything like that, won't push his cowardice aside even in the aftermath of literally experiencing what it's like to lose him.) He's here, in his own words, to help Richie pack. (Because Richie has made it very clear from Night One that he's getting the fuck out of Derry. He loves his parents and his sister and his nieces and nephew, but he needs to get the fuck out. Rat climbing out of its maze.)

"I wouldn't have blamed you, you know," Eddie says. "If you'd left."

Richie snorts. "It was super fucked up, Eds, no kidding. Apparently I haven't grown any more balls since age thirteen. At least Bill didn't slug me this time."

Eddie gets this weird look on his face that makes Richie unsure if they ever told him all the details of the fight. "Seriously, Rich, I would've had the exact same reaction to all this shit," he says, a little irritably. "Any of us would have!"

"Bill wouldn't have," Richie says stubbornly. "Mike wouldn't have, and I bet Bev wouldn't have…"

"Fuck that. They were as scared as we were this time around," Eddie snaps. "And besides that, you  _ did  _ stay. You stayed and called us all back, and that counts for a lot."

_ And you almost died because of it,  _ Richie's brain vomits out involuntarily. He bites down hard on his lip and winces. "Well, it definitely wasn't out of bravery," he says. "Maybe stupidity. Or puberty-ridden Bill astral-projecting into the future to put me in a headlock."

Eddie snorts, one foot on the bare coffee table. "He would have," Richie adds. "He definitely fucking would have. That kid was nuts."

"We were all nuts," says Eddie. "We were  _ thirteen _ ."

"Yeah, fine, but Billy Boy was a special brand of nuts. And who could fucking blame him! The Georgie of it all." Richie waves a hand around wildly. "This town drives you fucking insane. Look what it did to Bowers."

"Ha ha," Eddie says, his voice dry, and Richie shuts up. They sit in silence for a second, staring at the blank screen of Richie's TV—that's how fucking far gone he was, he was ready to leave his  _ TV _ . Then Eddie says, his voice quiet, "Do you know where you're gonna go when you leave?"

Richie sighs, his eyes fixed determinedly on one dusty corner of the wall, where he used to hang pictures. (He had one of all the Losers that he loved, that he talked himself into framing a couple years ago: all of them sprawled out in this giant pile of hay out at Mike's farm, mugging for the camera. In it, he's wearing a pair of sunglasses that he stole from Bev on top of his own bug-eyed glasses, and is lying half on top of Eddie to mess up his hair. It was one of the first things he packed.) "No fucking clue, man," he says, defeated. He can't wait to get out of here, but if he's telling the truth, he hates that everyone disbanded so fast. He's waited for them to come back for so long. It's not like they're completely gone, there's a group chat and tentative plans to meet up again, but he already misses them, already feels himself wallowing in his own loneliness. He doesn't know what he'll do when they're all gone, and Eddie's headed back to NYC. "Maybe I'll bug Mike for a while. I was thinking of traveling a little, but… I dunno." 

"It's weird to think about getting back to real life," Eddie says, quietly. Like it's a secret. "It feels like everything has changed."

Richie exhales slowly, pulls his glasses off to rub them with the hem of his shirt. "Yeah," he says. "You got it, Eds."

"I'm… not really sure where I'm gonna go now." There's a guilty, fearful edge to Eddie's voice, like he didn't mean to say that out loud. Then he adds in a rush, "I asked my wife for a divorce. She's not going to let me in the house." 

There's a weird rushing in Richie's ears, like the ocean. His living room is still a blur when he turns back to look at Eddie, he can only make out vague shapes, so he shoves his glasses back on to make everything snap into place. "Shit," he says slowly, unsure of what else to say. Telling himself it doesn't mean a goddamn thing. "Eddie, I…" 

"It's not a bad thing," Eddie tells him, almost sternly. He sounds like he's saying it to himself as much as Richie. "It's  _ not _ . I-it needed to happen, and I finally worked up the courage to do it, and that's it."

"Shit," is all Richie can say in response, again. He wipes his suddenly, stunningly sweaty hands on the side of his pants and says, "Well, uh, I'm happy for you, in that case. Good for you, Eds."

Eddie nods a little, relief spreading over his face. Like he needed to hear that. 

Because Richie is an idiot, the next thing out of his mouth is, "D'ya think I could give her a call? I've been so  _ lonely _ , Spaghetti, ever since your mom…" He bursts into wild laughter as he dodges Eddie's annoyed swats, regressing back to thirteen at the speed of light. 

Eddie looks just as annoyed as he would have at thirteen, swatting again and catching him on the shoulder this time, grumbling, "You fucking asshole," in a tone that says he probably doesn't mean it. 

Richie jams a hand against his mouth to muffle the laughter and adds, "Seriously, I'm happy for you. Live your best life. And all that inspirational shit."

"You're an idiot," Eddie grumbles, but he's looking at Richie all weird. He takes a deep breath and adds, "It… it's probably impulsive on my part, considering I almost died like five times. You read all that shit about people changing their whole lives after a near death experience. But I really… that claw almost skewering us kind of shook some sense into me, you know? I mean, Jesus Christ, I almost…  _ you  _ almost…" He looks a little green now. 

Richie  _ feels _ a little green, like he's going to throw up now, he's really going to do it. He can't stop seeing it all go the wrong way, the blood in Eddie's mouth, the way he whimpered Richie's name. Eddie's still talking, his voice shaking. "I kept thinking before we went down there that I didn't want to die here because there were… still things I wanted to do, and then I thought  _ you  _ were going to die, and it took you so long to come out of the Deadlights… And you… you pushed me out of the way, you…" He breaks off mid-sentence and stares at Richie with something like concern. "Rich? Are you okay?"

"I saw you die," Richie blurts, unaware he's saying it until it's out, and immediately disgusted with himself  _ for  _ saying it. He can't keep his mouth shut about anything. "In the Deadlights, that's… how I knew to push you out of the way."

Eddie's gone a little pale, staring at him with wide eyes. "Oh," he says, faintly, all over again. 

"It wasn't  _ real,  _ though," Richie says urgently. "It wasn't real, cause you're here, you didn't die, and you—" 

He's cut off mid-sentence by Eddie leaning forward and embracing him. Tightly and desperately. The way they hugged in the cave for about ten seconds, hunched awkwardly on the floor. Richie goes a little limp, wraps his arms around Eddie's back and turns his face a little into his neck. He thinks Eddie is shaking, in his arms, and he might be shaking a little too. He just shuts his eyes and listens to Eddie's pulse and tries not to cry. 

Minutes or hours later, he speaks again. He says, "We're super fucked up, Spagheds. We need to get the fuck out of this town." 

Eddie snorts something into Richie's shoulder that might be a sob, but sounds more like a laugh. Richie reaches over to mess up Eddie's hair as they pull away, and Eddie only kind of halfheartedly shrugs him off, swiping at his eyes. "This is gonna sound fucking nuts," he says gingerly, "but you remember when we were kids and we applied to all those schools, and you applied to like five in LA, and then Fordham and NYU with me and Stan?"

"Do  _ you _ remember that, Dr. K? I wasn't the one with random, spontaneous Clown Amnesia," says Richie. Eddie rolls his eyes a little, and he swallows dryly and says, "Yeah, I remember." 

"You and me both got into Fordham," says Eddie. "I sent in my deposit, and then Stan accepted NYU… and for a while, I thought you might come to New York with us. Before you got into that school in California. I… I almost asked you to come with us. With me."

Richie's throat is tight. He's thinking about his ten million daydreams about New York with Eddie and Stan but mostly Eddie. "I thought about it," he says. "I really did. And then when I ended up not going to college at all… remember when I drove you to the bus stop?" Eddie nods, his expression unreadable. "Well, this is also fucking nuts. But I almost asked you to stay."

Eddie laughs a little, rubbing his face with one hand. "We should've fucking coordinated that."

" _ Clearly _ ," says Richie. "We could've been a couple of sexy-ass clown-fighting roommates—minus the clown fighting, actually, cause we're smarter than that—and I coulda saved you from a shitload of alimony." 

"Beep beep, you fucking asshole," says Eddie, jabbing Richie in the side, but he's laughing. 

Richie jabs him right back, just because. "Who woulda thunk we'd find ourselves in such a similar position twenty-seven years later?" He puts on a Voice: " _ Lost, wayward wanderers… basically homeless… _ Maybe we can both move in with Mikey."

He's completely kidding, but Eddie gets this look in his eye like he's actually considering it, and suddenly Richie's heart is pounding like crazy and he has to look away before his poker face slips and it's all out in the open. What the  _ fuck _ ? He didn't mean for this shit to happen, but if it's happening… 

"You could come to New York with me now, if you want," Eddie offers tentatively. "While I'm figuring things out. We could find an apartment. Split the rent. Save some money."

"Ridiculous Manhattan real estate prices in the mix?" Richie says, mouth turning up nervously on one side. Pretending this isn't everything he's wanted for twenty-some years, that he doesn't want to get ridiculously giddy. "Who are we, Monica and Rachel? Are we getting a pet monkey now?"

"Or we could go somewhere else," Eddie offers. His eyes are fixed determinedly on Richie's bare wall now, but his hand is inching across the couch cushions, his fingers are brushing Richie's. "If you want to go somewhere else. I don't… I haven't seen much of the world, either."

Richie grins a little. He can't quite look at Eddie yet, but he can slot their hands together, intertwine their fingers. "You kidding me, Eds?" he says, and holds on tightly. "For you? Anywhere in the world."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the differing structure of this one was kind of meant to give myself a break from the typical missing years formula i've been using. my original idea was to form the whole thing around eddie helping richie pack, and it didn't turn out exactly that way, but i still knew that was where it'd end up. 
> 
> getting into the reasoning of why richie would stay was interesting--part of why i had his family stay was to give him more of a reason to stay. the first line about his nieces and nephews was one of those lines that just pop into your head and you have to get them down before you forget. i figured richie would kind of have a similar way of purposefully forgetting the clown like eddie did, and his reasoning wouldn't lie very much in the clown. i also figured he would try to get in touch with all of his friends at some point to confirm the forgetting thing. for some reason, richie's motivation was the hardest to pin down, but i finally found an angle i liked. 
> 
> now seems like a good time to clarify that i have never been to the part of maine where bangor and hampden are. (i've driven up into brunswick and that's about it.) i based the placing of derry on the fact that king took the inspiration from bangor and the references to bangor in the book. and i found hampden in Google maps. i apologize for any inaccuracies. 
> 
> i had a lot of references to lighthouse keeper in this one, including the college choices of eddie and stan, the scene with the bus station, and the sleepover the night before. in LK, mike takes eddie to the bus station, and i thought it'd be an interesting role for richie to play considering his feelings for eddie. the sexy-ass roommates line is borrowed from LK, because i enjoyed it a lot. i also included a couple references to midnights and the deadlights, since that's such a richie-centric fix. i borrowed richie's motivation for the kissing bridge from there, and richie's reference to the book Hatchet. (there was a lot of talking about Hatchet in midnights for no real reason lol.) the little rant that richie has about there being nowhere to eat in derry is borrowed from my own hometown. (we just got a Starbucks.)
> 
> i didn't intend for richie and eddie's chapters to both include scenes of richie patching up eddie after bowers. i considered a couple different scenarios for the bowers situation, but i wanted one that led to them talking, and having richie actually be there after bowers was hard to resist. i also didn't intend for the scene at the end to be so long but i felt like there was a lot they. needed to get through. (and i still feel like i left stuff out. i need to write more fixit fic and have an excuse to write out all these conversations.)


	6. STANLEY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stan doesn't remember everything right away, and he knows this is by design. Like the clown was aware that he wouldn't have stayed, wouldn't have brought his wife there, if he had remembered. He can say a lot of things about the years he's spent in Derry, good and bad alike, but he can also say with great certainty that he never would've set one fucking toe over the town line if he had remembered the clown. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry this chapter took so long to be written and released. i wasn't expecting to have so much trouble with this chapter, but writers block hit pretty hard. i'm also sorry for the sheer LENGTH of this chapter. it got a little out of hand. patty blum uris might be a slight weakness for me. 
> 
> warning in this chapter for suicidal thoughts in the realm of the movie, and also under the assumption that the clown essentially forced stan's hand in canon. it's kind of limited to one section but it might be a little intense.

Stan doesn't remember everything right away, and he knows this is by design. Like the clown was aware that he wouldn't have stayed, wouldn't have brought his  _ wife  _ there, if he had remembered. He can say a lot of things about the years he's spent in Derry, good and bad alike, but he can also say with great certainty that he never would've set one fucking toe over the town line if he had remembered the clown. 

Stan had nightmares about the clown starting in the summer of 1989 that didn't end until he left for college. Nightmares that left him waking up screaming, kicking aside sweat-soaked sheets, wiping tears on his pillowcase. He would wake up with the scars on his face stinging like crazy, like something had opened them up, the scar on his palm where Bill had cut him stinging, too. He would wipe blood off his face at night with Kleenex, hide the blood-stained tissue at the bottom of his wastebasket, and then go to dispose of them in the morning and find no traces of the blood he had sworn would be there. He thought he was going crazy. His mom got so concerned that she started sending him to a therapist every week, which didn't really help. The only real comfort he had was that his friends seemed as miserable as he was for a while after. The memories of fighting the clown haunted Stanley for five straight years, to the point where the town felt claustrophobic, worse than it had before. To the point where he was anxious to get out by the time he turned eighteen. Every college acceptance letter was a relief, a ticket out of the hell hole where he'd grown up. Even if their promise to come back was hanging over him like a dense fog. 

Stan never really forgot about the promise, not even as all his friends did. Not until he left. And he didn't remember it when he came back, either. The clown made sure of it; Stan is positive of that. He doesn't remember the clown,  _ or  _ the promise until the middle of 2016, when the third person dies. That's when it all comes crashing back, makes him stumble forward in blinded shock onto his knees, knocking straight into the coffee table in front of him. Sending puzzle pieces tumbling all over the ground. 

\---

Stanley left Derry for New York when he was eighteen, and was gone for only about four and a half years before he came back. The reason he came back to Maine was because of his parents, who moved to Bangor a few months after he graduated. His mom had gotten sick, had needed a transplant, and Stan had felt like he should go home and help out. His wife had gone with him—his fiancée, at the time; they'd graduated a few weeks earlier, and they hadn't really had anywhere to go at the moment, and—as Patty had mentioned more than once—she  _ wanted  _ to go with him. So they packed up their separate rooms, Patty's at her sorority and Stan's at his dorm, and drove north, hands joined overtop of the console in their tiny little car, Patty's ring catching the sunlight. They'd gone together—Stan is relieved even as he is horrified, in the moment, that they'd gone together. In the moment, he can't believe he's brought her to this horrible place, the place that has haunted him most of his life, but before now, there had never been a question about it, about them going together. She's the love of his life. 

They'd gone to Bangor and spent several months in his parents' new house. Things were still uneasy between Stan and his father, but otherwise the situation was still fairly good, all things considered—his parents loved Patty, and her parents hated him, so it seemed like the better situation. His mother recovered fully, which was an extraordinary relief. And he and Patty got married in the late Maine summer, in front of a shimmering lake that Stan remembered going to as a child. Their intention was to move somewhere when his mom had fully recovered, wherever Patty could get a teaching job—maybe somewhere warm—but by that fall, Patty had an offer from somewhere local: Derry Elementary. 

The idea of staying came as something of a surprise to the both of them, but Patty had liked the idea. She had fallen a little in love with Maine in their months there—"It's like a quaint upstate New York," she offered. And Stanley's parents were in favor, of course; his mom kept hinting gently at grandchildren, and then reassuring Stan that of course there was no  _ pressure  _ until they were a little older. 

Stanley himself wasn't sure. He didn't have very good memories of his hometown or his childhood, which had always confused him, and that idea was enough to make him wary. Besides, ending back up where he'd been his whole life seemed a bit regressive. But there was something in his gut that seemed to be pulling him back towards Derry. He'd been having a tangle of strange dreams since his return to Derry, dreams about a deep, green lake (or maybe a quarry), sun breaking through the water, a turtle swimming above him. A prodding sort of feeling. At one point, Stan could've sworn he heard a voice, a voice he couldn't place, but one that said something like,  _ You have to come back. They're all gone, so you have to come back.  _ He told Patty about all this—their relationship wasn't very old, but already they seemed to fit together with great ease, and they told each other everything. "Maybe it's a sign," she'd told him, clasping his hand with her head on his shoulder. The new feeling of their rings between their intertwined fingers was a marvel to the both of them. "Maybe Derry is where we're supposed to end up."

The one thing that Stan hadn't understood at the time was the nightmares. He'd told Patty about those, too, he hadn't hidden them, but he didn't make the connection until years later. The nightmares began coming when he and Patty were faced with the decision of leaving or staying, and he seemed to have them on the days when they considered anywhere  _ but  _ Derry. Patty got a job offer in Georgia around the same time as the offer in Derry, and they'd seriously considered it for a few days. They spent a morning browsing real estate listings down there, and then went to take an afternoon nap, and Stan was plagued with a series of horrible nightmares followed by sleep paralysis, which was made no less horrible by daylight. He ended up screaming bloody murder, which shook Patty as badly as it shook him. His parents heard it, too, and his mom commented quietly at dinner that she hadn't heard him scream like that since he was thirteen or fourteen. And somehow, Georgia never came up again. 

The nightmares came this way—although they varied in intensity—every time Stanley and Patty discussed leaving Maine. And when they settled on Derry, the nightmares began to fade. Stan noticed they had stopped the first night in Derry—the night after a long, chilly day in mid-November when they moved into the little house they'd picked up, with no furniture aside from a couch that Stan's mom had offered up, and the mattress for their new bed, which they placed on the floor due to their lack of a bed frame. Stan went to sleep wrapped in blankets and his wife on the floor in the middle of their mostly empty bedroom, chilly and giddy with happiness, and slept seamlessly the whole night through. And he didn't have nightmares like that again until 2016. He hadn't realized, then, how deeply It was manipulating him. 

Anyways, if Stan had been uneasy about the move to Derry at first, most of those feelings went away after their first couple days there, because after a couple days in Derry, Stan started remembering—specifically, remembering all the  _ good  _ parts of his childhood. He thinks now that this was a calculated, cold-blooded move by the fucking clown—give him back everything he wanted to remember, all his happy childhood memories and his friends, but don't give back the horrible things, the things that would make him run. A manipulation to get him to stay. 

Stan hadn't cared. He'd been so happy at the time that he isn't sure he would've cared if he had remembered the whole thing. It only came back in bits and pieces at first—he was sitting out on the porch with Pats, drinking coffee, and he looked out at the sidewalk and said, "I went trick or treating here when I was fourteen. I think one of my friends lived over here. But we didn't stay over here for long because… I think somebody wanted to go over to the rich neighborhoods to look for full sized candy bars." Or they drove out to pick up a pizza and Stan said, "Oh! My mom loved this place when I was a kid. We'd come here, like, every other Friday night." He remembered the synagogue where his dad had been the rabbi, or the playground where he used to play as a toddler and build hulking, shapeless sandcastles, or the spots where he used to go birdwatching. 

After a couple days, the memories got more specific. He went with Patty to look at her new classroom at Derry Elementary, and was immediately struck with memories in the halls. They ended up in the kindergarten wing, briefly, and it looked miles away from the school where Stan had gone, but he was suddenly struck with a million memories; he could almost see them. He looked into a classroom and could almost see himself and three other kids stacking blocks on a colorful rug. Bill, Richie, Eddie… "This was my classroom," he told Patty abruptly. "When I was in kindergarten."

Patty turned to him with interest, squeezing his hand. "Really?"

"Yeah, I…" His forehead furrowed with interest, with disbelief—disbelief that he had  _ forgotten.  _ "I met my best friends here," he said quietly. "Bill, Richie, and Eddie."

She grinned at him gently. "You've never mentioned them before."

"Yeah, I know, I don't… I don't think I remembered them." Stanley chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. "I don't actually know how I could've forgotten," he added. One of his earliest memories of the three of them—which was just now solidifying in his mind—was of the monkey bars. They were all terrified of them, but Richie dared Eddie to climb them, and when Eddie told him to go away, he dared Stan, and Stan dared him right back, and Richie tried it and immediately fell and scraped his knees. And then Bill tried it and actually did it, and Richie had been equally furious and awed, the typical Bill Denbrough combination. 

And they'd all ended up hanging out anyway. Swinging on the swings. Piling up mulch. Climbing trees. Getting yelled at for climbing trees. Ducking behind slides to avoid bullies—Henry Bowers had probably been a horrible third grader then. He was remembering and probably smiling like an idiot in disbelief that he hadn't remembered before. "They were pretty memorable, huh?" said Patty, and he said quietly, "Yeah."

They ended up basking in memories for the rest of the day. He helped Patty set up her classroom—in empty substitute limbo—and kept telling stories at Patty's teasing prodding. Patty's classroom was actually his second grade classroom, where he and Bill and Eddie had been without Richie, who was alone in the other classroom. (Richie had been furious, especially when recess didn't correspond.) Second grade was the year Bowers had lured him and Eddie into the woods at the school picnic and left them there. He told her about the time when Bill knocked a baby tooth out at field day, and the time that Richie started a paint fight in art class, and the third grade play that Bill starred in, and the shady spot on the baseball field where they used to play  _ Star Wars.  _ The rest of the day developed in that direction almost unconsciously, even after they left the school; Patty kept having questions, and Stan kept thinking of places to show her. He took her down to the Barrens and the quarry and the Standpipe, and even tried to find the clubhouse for about twenty minutes before giving up. He eventually remembered Ben and Mike and Bev, and all the stories that came along with them, and he showed Patty the cliff that Bev had jumped off of to show them all up, and the library where he and Ben and Mike would occasionally seek studying refuge. They drove out to the Hanlon farm, too, but the sign at the front was under a different name. Stan guessed the Hanlons had moved. 

By the end of the night, he must have told Patty a thousand stories that she listened to with genuine interest—he hadn't realized how little he'd shared about himself in the time they'd been married. That night in bed, her head on his shoulder, she whispered into his neck, "Stanley, why didn't you tell me any of this before?" And he kissed her forehead and her hair and whispered back, genuinely confused, "I don't know, Pats. It was like I didn't remember any of this before now."

He spent a couple days muddling over it as the memories kept flooding back into his mind, because it really  _ didn't  _ make sense. He couldn't understand why he hadn't thought about this town or his friends in four years, much less why he'd never told Patty about it. He couldn't understand why he'd never gotten back in touch with his friends, or come back to Derry to visit on holidays—Bangor wasn't that far from Derry. He couldn't understand why he and Eddie hadn't kept in touch since—as he remembered abruptly one day when unpacking a box from his dorm at NYU—they'd both ended up in New York City, albeit at different schools. They had sworn they'd keep in touch and meet up whenever they could. Ben had been in Philadelphia, and had talked about riding the bus up to see them, and they'd never done that, either. "It's like I just… forgot all those promises we made," he told Patty a few nights later, eating takeout cross-legged in the middle of the living room floor. "Like I forgot them completely even though… they were some of my best friends. Some of the closest friends I've ever had." He'd made friends at college, but they hadn't filled the void of the Loser's Club of 1989. He remembered missing them then, or at least missing something he couldn't quite put a finger on. "And I have no idea why it's happening," he finished.

"It's so strange that it all would've only come back now," Patty said thoughtfully. "Like it was connected to the town or something."

"It is strange," said Stan absently, his eyes fixed on the window. It was a freezing night, snow beginning to fall outside, and he was suddenly stricken with the memory of the time they'd gone sledding and Bill had broken his wrist. They'd pulled him home on his sled, with a tiny, extremely bundled Georgie offering help, and Richie and Stan exchanging private, relieved looks that it had been Bill and not Eddie. Mrs. Kaspbrak would've had their heads, flipped her shit the way she did the summer when Eddie… 

Stan's mind seemed to hit a block there, seemed to recoil away. When Eddie what? When Eddie got hurt somehow? What had happened? His brow furrowed in frustrated confusion as he stared out the window, reaching for the memory again and again and coming up empty. He could remember a thirteen-year-old Eddie, entering eighth grade with a cast on his arm that none of them had signed for some reason, but he couldn't remember  _ how  _ he had gotten it. 

Patty poked him gently in the knee with her chopstick, bringing him back to the present. "Maybe this isn't something that's just happened to you," she offered, shoving her glasses on top of her head thoughtfully. "Maybe your friends have experienced it, too."

"Maybe," Stan said, looking back at his wife with grateful relief. On his palm, the one where he was holding his box of noodles, he felt a sudden, sharp sting, beginning in the center and spreading out up and down his palm. He immediately swore, dropping the box and shaking his hand hard. 

"Are you okay?" Patty asked, leaning forward. 

"I'm fine, baby. Just a—weird stinging feeling," said Stanley, and he shook his hand one more time before studying it intently. The scar crossing his palm had been there forever, but it was like he was seeing it for the first time. It was a long, thin line cut diagonally across, and he couldn't remember how he got it. 

Patty had her hand on his knee now, looking at him with concern, and he looked back at her and smiled to reassure her. "I'm okay," he said again, and covered her hand with his. 

"Good," Patty said, smiling a little back. She pulled her glasses back down with one hand and squeezed his with the other before extracting it to grab her chopsticks again. "Do you want some of mine?"

"No, thanks." Stan gathered up noodles in a napkin and dumped them back into the container. 

Patty waited until he was done to speak again. "Maybe you should try and get in touch with these friends of yours, see if they've experienced any of this," she offered. "Even if they haven't… if they meant that much to you, they sound like people we should have in our lives."

"You want to meet them?" Stan said, teasing, and Patty grinned and said, "Oh, of course I want to meet them. They sound like a lot of fun. But I think you should see them again. You sound like you've really missed them, Stanley." And Stan really, really had.

He began to try and get in touch with them the next day, beginning with trying to see if any of them were still in town, or had come back since college. None of them were. He found Richie's parents in that same old house on Colbridge Avenue, and they were happy to see him, and told him that Richie was still out in L.A. and they'd tell him to get in touch. They also told him that Eddie's mom had moved out to New Jersey to be near Eddie soon after they'd all left, so Eddie never really came back, and that Bill's dad and Ben's mom were still in Derry but they never came home either. The Hanlons had moved out of Derry about a year after they all left, to seek better treatment for Mike's grandfather, and Mike went with them. Bev never came back, either, and Stan honestly couldn't say he blamed her. The Toziers couldn't tell him how to contact anyone, but they gave him a whole sheaf of old pictures, ranging anywhere from yearbook cutouts (there was one of their first grade class with a tiny Bev circled with Sharpie) to Polaroids of him and Bill and Eddie and Richie to pictures of the whole club and the club after Bev's departure, and even a few pictures of just Stan and Richie. There was one of the two of them at Stan's bar mitzvah, in suits and yarmulkes, taken at the party at Stan's house afterwards. They were sitting on the couch with orange soda and Richie was making a face and holding his fingers up in bunny ears behind Stan's head. Stan took them all home, and stashed them on his desk in their office room after showing everything to Patty. 

After that, Stan worked on trying to figure out where his friends had ended up. It wasn't an easy task by any means, considering they were probably all fresh college graduates, or still in college, so he couldn't find any of them in the phone book or anything like that. When Thanksgiving arrived, Patty suggested he look for their parents' numbers and trying to call them there. Which was pretty much his only option, since Ben and Richie didn't come back for the holiday. Stan had no idea where the Hanlons had ended up, but he found Bill's mom still in Brunswick, and eventually found a Sonia Kaspbrak in a suburb of New York. He didn't have any luck with Eddie, though—pretty much as soon as he said who he was, Eddie's mom was hanging up the phone, and Stan was plunged into about a million Mrs. K flashbacks. ("We all  _ hated  _ her growing up," he told Patty grimly. "Everyone did, even our parents, cause even they could see how awful she was.") 

Stan had more luck with the Denbroughs in that Bill's mom didn't hang up on him right on the spot. She didn't seem to remember who he was, though, which would've added to Stan's theory except that Bill's mom had moved out of Derry five or six years ago and had been mentally checked out for years before that—ever since Georgie, really. She wasn't really the same woman who made them all French Toast on Saturday morning at Bill's and told them (gently but sternly) to be sure to include Georgie in their games. Stan had to explain when she picked up the phone; he led with, "Hi, Ms. Denbrough—" (conscious of leaving out that extra R, since she and Bill's dad were divorced) "—it's Stanley Uris. Is Bill there?"

"He is," Ms. Denbrough said distractedly, and then, "Stanley who?"

"Uris. Stanley Uris," Stan said, trying not to mentally channel Richie screeching  _ Stanley Urine!  _ circa about eight years old, when Eddie and Bill had found that hilarious. "We were friends back in Derry," he added. 

"Oh," said Ms. Denbrough thoughtfully. "I'll go get him." She set down the phone. Below him from where he was sitting on his desk, Patty met his eyes with her eyebrows raised, smudging away a pen spot on her cheek from where she'd been tapping her pen against her face. (She was in the middle of lesson plans, using his desk instead of hers because, "It's neater, honey.") Stan shrugged and pulled her glasses out of her hair just so she would snatch them back. 

"I'm sorry," Bill's mom said suddenly on the other end, "but he says he doesn't know a Stanley Uris."

A cold feeling fell over Stan, and he turned away from Patty to stare at the phone, to clutch at it with one hand. "Ms. Denbrough," he said, "can I please talk to him?"

"He says he doesn't know you. And he's writing, anyway."

"Ms. Debrough, please…" Stan tried again, but it was too late. Bill's mom had already hung up. 

In the stony aftermath of the empty dial tone, Stan just stared helplessly at Patty, unsure of what to do now, unsure of what he could say aside from, "He doesn't remember." 

He felt Patty's hand land comfortingly on his thigh but he wasn't focused on that; his head was spinning, trying to make sense of it all. Before today, he could have believed that his strange memory lapse was some kind of medical condition, or a fluke. He figured that his friends would remember. But Bill not remembering, or choosing not to speak to him  _ because  _ he didn't remember… If it were Mrs. Kaspbrak, he might could tell himself that she just didn't want him to talk to Bill, but it wasn't Mrs. Kaspbrak, and Stan had never known Bill's mom to do anything like that. 

Stan got a fuller picture a few months later, when he and Patty drove to New York to see Patty's parents a couple months later and the same thing happened all over again. He forgot the whole thing, every single memory of childhood that he had; he couldn't answer questions when Patty asked them, and it all came crashing back as soon as he reentered Derry. Patty seemed as confused as he was about the whole thing, unable to understand how it could work that way; she believed him, of course, but neither of them could understand why. "It's like a curse," she said at one point. "It's kind of creepy, if you think about it."

Stan agreed without even thinking about it; he was happy to be back, and he was grateful for the memories, but he didn't like the fact that they disappeared over town lines. The  _ powerlessness  _ of it all. "Do you want to leave?" he asked, lining his hand up with the back of hers and sliding their fingers together. They were on their porch wrapped in a quilt, one that her mother had made, watching the sun sink low in the sky, and he would do anything for her. 

"Do  _ you  _ want to leave?" Patty murmured, sliding her cold foot under the tent of his leg. 

"I want anything that you want, babylove, I don't care," said Stanley—which wasn't true and was at the same time. He liked remembering, liked being in the places where he'd been happy and had been with his friends, and he didn't like the lack of control that came with leaving the loss of memories that he couldn't stop. But he'd do anything for Patty, and he wouldn't stay in a town that did this if she didn't want to. What if it did that to her, what if they left and they lost their first few years of marriage together? He couldn't do that to her. 

Patty bumped her head against his gently and said, "Liar." But there wasn't any malice in her voice. She pressed a lingering kiss to the side of his neck and said, "I think we should stay, Stanley. I do. This memory thing is creepy, but I wouldn't want to lose eighteen years of my life, and that seems to be what happens if we leave. And… it's crazy, but I sort of like it here. I love my job and my kids, and I like being in the town where you grew up.” She spoke into the crook of his shoulder, her breath warm on his skin: “I think we should stay, if you want to.”

The sky was streaked with fading colors, darkening at the edges; Stan looked down at his wife and whispered, “I don’t want to forget,” his breath puffing frozenly out in the cold air. He didn’t want to forget his friends—everything he had forgotten, every memory he got back after crossing the town line—and he didn’t want to forget this, these months with just him and Patty here in the town where he had grown up. He forgot little details when he was in New York: what the duvet from their bed looked like, the color pens Patty kept on their desks, the pictures they’d put on the mantle. He couldn’t risk losing anything bigger, anything more significant. He couldn’t lose his entire childhood and he couldn’t lose this. Patty turned her head up to look at him and he pressed a kiss to her forehead. 

So they stayed. For almost eighteen years, they stayed in Derry, the town where Stan had grown up—maybe because they wanted to, or maybe because they were trapped. Stanley honestly isn’t sure anymore.

\---

Trapped or not, and even in his current state of mind, Stan can’t say the years he’s spent here were all bad. He had Patty, above all else, and that counted for a hell of a lot. They’d really been happy those eighteen years of marriage—not from circumstances around them, but from each other. They  _ are  _ happy now. From the day they met, Stan thinks he has loved Patty with everything in him, so much it hurt, and that hasn't changed a bit in their time together. It's been like that their entire time in Derry, even when it felt like everything was going to shit. 

They've made a home here. They spent seven years in that little house before moving to a bigger one, and Stanley still has desperately fond memories of the two of them in that house, painting and decorating and reorganizing, making it theirs. That was when Patty had still been a new teacher and he'd worked first in delivery, and then as an accountant in a couple different offices in Bangor, and they got to a place where they could come home exhausted at the end of the day and just fall into each other, curled around the other person on the couch. They visited Stan's parents pretty frequently, and Patty talked to her mother on the phone just as frequently, and less frequently, they went down to New York to see them; Patty's father clearly still had a lot of disdain for him, but it gradually began to dissipate when it became clear that the two of them could make their own way in the world. In the summer, they had picnics or took hikes, and Stan took Patty to the quarry sometimes (minus the jumping, aside from one giggly morning when she kept daring him to do it). They adopted a cat after she started sleeping on their porch and neither of them could stop feeding her, until one day she just pushed past the screen door and hopped on the couch like she'd lived there all along. They had a garden and wind chimes and a bird bath and three bird feeders, guarded carefully from the cat (who lived inside). They even made friends in town, especially Patty—she joined a book club that met at the library, she signed up for art classes at the rec. (But making new friends was always accompanied, for Stan, with the nagging feeling that they would never be as close as he was with the other Losers. Which was a completely ridiculous precedent—he could still remember standing in that clubhouse, wearing the anti-spider shower caps, and pointing out that they probably wouldn’t all hang out as grown-ups. But Bill had told him they would, and Stan had held onto that hope, and now that he remembered all of this, it just felt like something had been yanked away from him. Even if the idea had never been realistic in the first place.) 

Despite this part, it was every inch the idyllic life Stan had always wanted (his parents had a first grade writing assignment somewhere that read _When I grow up I want to be married and live in a house and own all kinds of birds_ ), the kind of life he hadn't thought was possible in Derry. (And maybe it wasn't possible. Sometimes Stanley doubted that it was.)

It was the little things that made him doubt it. Derry had a darkness to it, and that darkness didn't fade any with time. There was still frequent crime in the town, frequent things that made the two of them flinch when reading the newspaper at the breakfast table. Patty kept having kids like Bev or Eddie, with horrible parents, and she threw herself wholeheartedly into trying to help them and was horrified when it never worked. (The strange fog that Stan remembered affecting adults when he was a kid didn't seem to affect Patty, or him, either. Or maybe it was and he didn't realize, because he  _ was  _ an adult. He and the others used to always declare that they would  _ never  _ be like that—but then again, he didn't know he would end up back here.) There were things that happened that made them both shiver—people acting horribly, or odd sounds in the night. Patty thought the house was haunted, and once when they were twenty-eight, ordered sage to cleanse it with. It didn't help, of course. The charm wore off over the years, of being back in Derry—Patty still loved her job and her friends, and Stan still loved the memories, but they gradually became disillusioned with the town. They talked about leaving, every now and then, but never seriously. The threat of memory loss still loomed over them, and they usually had nightmares every time they would discuss leaving, like a bad omen of sorts. So they kept staying. But odd little things like that made it so life wasn't perfect, made it so Stan felt almost the same about the town as he had when he was a kid. And then there was the thing with  _ their  _ kids—or lack thereof. 

Stan and Patty both wanted kids. They'd talked about it many times before and after they got married, and they began trying in earnest in their late twenties. But they had been stunningly, shockingly unsuccessful, so much that by midway through their second year of trying, they visited a doctor to make sure nothing was wrong. They found that nothing was, but even years later, there was no sign of children. 

This created both fear and relief in Stan, because of both his deep desire to have kids, and his knowledge of the way that Derry is. Soon after he and Patty began trying, the memories came roaring back, of all the kids who went missing when Stan was thirteen. He didn't remember _why_ they went missing, at the time—although various books and Wikipedia articles cited fucking Henry Bowers—but he knew it had terrified him as a kid, and it terrified him now. The one that stuck out the most was Georgie Denbrough, because he knew Georgie and because he had been at Georgie's funeral. He had spent most of it hiding in the pantry with the others, comforting Bill as he broke down, but he remembered, distinctly, the howling sobs of Mrs. Denbrough during the preacher's speech, when they'd still been at the church. The way she seemed to crumple in on herself while Bill shook beside her like he was having a panic attack, and he had exchanged frantic looks with Eddie and Richie, wanting to get up and go over there but not wanting to get any closer to those howls of pain. It was one of the worst sounds Stan has ever heard, and remembering things like that—remembering Betty Ripsom's mom, who stood outside the school every day looking for her daughter, Ed Corcoran's mom, who lost both her sons in the same year, remembering Bill, remembering how the Denbroughs crumbled after Georgie when they had been so happy before… Remembering things like that terrified him, when he thought about that being _his_ kid. About losing his kid.

He shared his fears with Patty, because they told each other everything, and Patty got quiet and wrapped her arms around him, her palm on the side of his face, and Stan knew she was thinking about the same things. And he whispered, "Babylove, I think we should leave Derry when we have kids," and she whispered back, "It's dangerous for kids anywhere, sweetheart," but then she agreed, her voice strong and unwavering, and he kissed her forehead and pretended he wasn't crying a little. 

Two years after that conversation, Patty had a false positive. They'd been so excited—Patty couldn't stop laughing, laughed so hard she cried, and Stan cried, too, scooped her up and whirled her around like they were in the movies and kissed her all over her face. They'd been so happy. They were thirty-three and had been trying for five years at that point. 

Patty made a doctor's appointment for the next day to confirm it, and that was when they found out it wasn't real. But Stanley feels like he should have known it wasn't real, because he had some of the worst nightmares of his life that night. Horrible nightmares about the sewers and swirling yellow dots and red balloons and red lights, and maniacal laughter. A crazed, strangely familiar voice screeching, " _ We all float down here! We all float down here, Stanley, and you'll float, too! You'll float and they'll float with you… they'll float with you, Stanley… _ " and underneath all of that was a child crying, one child or maybe more, wailing and screaming and crying for help… Stanley woke up covered in sweat and tears, shaking all over and muffling his sobs with one hand so he wouldn't wake up Patty. He hadn't known what it meant, but he'd known it was bad, and when the doctor told them that they weren't pregnant the next day, Stan had burst into tears right alongside Patty. But he still isn't sure whether they were tears of sadness or relief. 

They're going to adopt. They've been talking about it for a while now, looking at brochures and websites, and they actually have the first forms outside half filled out on the kitchen table. They're going to adopt, and they're going to leave Derry; they've been talking about it for a couple months now, moving somewhere else and getting a new job and raising their family, somewhere where they can be happy. Patty can't take this town anymore, not after this last year, and Stanley can't either, and they're ready to go. They've been so excited. 

But Stanley knows now—in his position, curled up in the dry tub, trying not to hyperventilate or scream—that they're never going to be able to leave. They're going to die here, him and Patty both, and all of his friends, and this is it, and it's all over, and he doesn't know what to do. He can't stop picturing the life they were going to have. A house somewhere warm—Georgia, maybe—with everything they have here or have ever wanted: fruit trees, a bigger garden, bird baths and feeders and a porch for the cat, a huge swing on the porch and smaller swings in the backyard for their kids. 

\---

Stan didn't remember the clown. He really didn't, all these years, and he'll fucking swear on that. He isn't sure what he's used to fill in these gaps all these years—probably Henry Bowers, like the rest of the town—but he knows he hadn't remembered this. And he didn't start to remember until those last few months before now. When the kids went missing. 

The first kid had been an old student of Patty's, a seventh grader now, but one who Patty remembered well. She took it hard—joined in the vigils and the searches, hung the posters that the kid's parents made and drove the town every night. Stan found her crying more than once, in the bathroom or in their office, and could only wordlessly wrap his arms around her and hold on. And it got even worse when the second kid disappeared. It was a kid from Patty's class this time, who disappeared on a rainy day three days after the beginning of summer vacation. It destroyed Patty. She loved all her kids, threw herself into being there for them and helping them and bonding with all of them, and losing a student she'd had so recently, had seen just a few days before… She was devastated and worried, lost in her grief. 

Stanley, meanwhile, was thrown back into his thirteenth year. The vigil for Georgie at the elementary school, the nights where they silently went along with Bill to search for him, Georgie's funeral and wake, the announcement by the principal that Betty had disappeared, the… The treks through the Barrens and into the sewer with Bill because he thought Georgie might have ended up there. Stan hadn't even remembered that until this year, and he had no idea why. It was like a crash of new memories he hadn't realized were missing came every time someone else disappeared—not even new memories, really, not yet, but old emotions. Fear, anxiety, throat-closing anxiety, the way he had barely wanted to go outside that summer. The nightmares he had every night, his fear that it would be his friends next. The grief he'd felt when his mother told him that Georgie was missing, because Georgie was like a little brother, to all of them. (Stan could still remember one day when four-year-old Georgie had followed him out into the backyard to help him look for birds, clutching Stan's hand with his own sticky one. It had felt like a punch to the gut when he heard about Georgie; he hadn't fucking believed it.) 

He saw Patty crying in the middle of the night and thought of Mrs. Denbrough, Mrs. Ripsom, Bill, his mom when she used to grab Stan in a tight hug and whisper, "I'm so glad you're still here, honey, I'm so glad you're still here." He saw grieving parents and Missing posters and was thrown back into being thirteen. And a sudden dread was building in the deep pit of his gut as the year went on, a feeling he couldn't quite explain. A feeling like something bad was coming, like it was going to get worse. Like there was something he had to  _ do _ , but he didn't know what. He would wake up sometimes with his palm, the one with the weird, long scar stretching across it, stinging like crazy. And the nightmares had returned, possibly worse than the ones he'd had about getting pregnant, or the ones when they were first considering moving to Derry. So bad that he woke up shaking nearly every night, coated head to toe in sweat, unshed tears building in his eyes, a familiar voice cackling wildly in his head. He and Patty had a lot of sleepless nights that year, curled up on the couch in front of the TV, their aging cat draped over their legs. On a night like that a few days ago, Patty had found his hand under the blanket and clung to it tightly, whispered, "Stanley, do you remember how we've discussed leaving here someday? I think… I think it might be time." And Stan sighed softly, pushed hair off of her forehead and said, "You're right, babylove. It's time. It's time."

Two days later, Adrian Mellon dies and Stan remembers, just like that. Remembers it all, when he's sitting over a bird puzzle in the middle of the living room. Patty's at the kitchen table behind him, looking at vacation rentals in Buenos Aires—they've been discussing taking a trip like that for a while, and this decision to leave Derry makes it feel like it's time—and he's just piecing together a bird puzzle. They've got the radio on, turned to the local news, because this has become Patty's routine, to listen to the radio every night for news about the missing kids. And the next thing they know, the guy on the radio is telling the news of Adrian's death. That he was found under a bridge, with bruises like he'd been beaten up and, somehow, bite marks. Stan is stricken by the same sick horror he gets every time he hears about a case like this—made worse by the fact that he actually  _ knew _ Adrian, he was in Patty's book club. Stan is sick to his stomach listening to the details, horrified and sick, but he hasn't figured it out yet; he's turning towards Patty with concern, thinking about comforting her, going to her and making her feel better. He's halfway off the couch, headed for his wife, when the radio guy says, "Witnesses report strange graffiti on the bridge where Mellon was found, that simply said  _ COME HOME  _ repeatedly," and Stan instantly goes dizzy. Tears his eyes painfully away from Patty to look back at the radio as it begins to crackle with static, loud, forboding static, and then a voice cuts through the static. The same voice from Stan's nightmares, every single nightmare he's had here. 

It says, " _ It's time, Stanley. It's time to bring them home _ ."

It hits Stan then, in a harsh wave. A fucking tsunami. Hits him so hard that he lurches forward, falls to his knees and knocks over the coffee table, sending puzzle pieces scattering every which way. The scar on his palm is stinging worse than it ever has before, and Stan wants to cry out but he can't, because his mind is filled to the brim, remembering the woman from the painting who bit his face, the lights in the sewers, the clown dancing, laughing, mouth streaked with blood, shrieking and shaking, looming over Eddie and his broken arm, carrying Bev off, grabbing Bill and threatening to kill him Georgie in the sewers with no arm, and they'd screamed and shouted and beat the clown with makeshift weapons, and they'd thought it had worked but Bev said she'd seen them as adults, that they fought the clown again, they'd come back, Bill made them swear to come back… 

"Stan!" Patty is calling from somewhere, frantically, but Stan can't hear. He's on his hands and knees among the scattered puzzle pieces, his head spinning, his head aching. He hears the voice again, but not from the radio, in his own head. Pennywise. It's saying,  _ Bring them home,  _ again and again. 

"STANLEY!" Patty shouts suddenly, kneeling beside him, her hand on his shoulder, his back, her voice shaking with teary worry. The voice says,  _ You're still a little coward, aren't you, Stanley? Too much of a coward to remember.  _ The voice is laughing gleefully, shouting,  _ You didn't WANT to remember me? You didn't MISS me, Stanley?  _

Stan shakes his head hard, his eyes shutting, and then snapping open. Patty is staring at him, sheet-white, her eyes wide, her cheeks wet, and he thinks dimly that this is wrong, but he can’t do anything about it, something won’t let him. Won’t even let him think about it, like there’s a block in his mind. He says dimly, “I’m okay, baby.” 

“You fell down,” Patty says insistently, and her hand is on the side of his face, her palm cool against his cheek. “Honey…” 

“I’m okay,” Stan says again, and gets to his feet. He can’t think, because all he can hear is the laughing in the back of his mind. His head is pounding. “I—have a migraine,” he says. “I’m going to go take a bath.” 

“This early?” His wife is staring at him like he is crazy. “Stan, honey, you’re hurt, you’re—in shock, or something, sit down.” 

She reaches for his hand and he pulls it away, gently. He can’t think, and It is still laughing, It’s saying,  _ She knows what a coward you are, Stanley, she knows, and your friends do, too, a fucking coward, little boy crying in the sewers, they left you here, you know,  _ and he can’t think, so he pulls his hand away and says again, “I’m going to take a bath.” And he turns and he walks towards the bathroom. 

He starts out moving calmly, but he’s broken into a run halfway down the hall. He’s got his hands over his ears, even though they’re useless at blocking out Its voice, and he thinks he might be crying. He cried in the sewers, after It got him, got him alone and tried to hurt him, and he’d never felt more alone in his life. He’d screamed at his friends like he’s never screamed at anyone but Henry Bowers, and his own father, once. He thinks of that and wishes he hadn't, and he pushes his way into the bathroom like he is walking through quicksand, and throws the lock, and climbs into the bathtub without even undressing or turning on the water. He distantly thinks this might be the first time he’s locked a door in his house in eighteen years.

Stan curls into a ball, thirteen again, thirteen and scared and hiding behind his hand in his father’s office and lingering on the porch of Neibolt and running from the house before anyone else, thinking,  _ I swore to come back. I swore to come back and I did, but I didn’t know, I didn’t fucking _ know,  _ and I never would have come back if I had known, and I am the only fucking one who kept my promise. _ He’s hunched over with his hands over his ears, trying not to cry, and It is still talking to him, laughing like crazy, and all he can think about is that day that they made this stupid promise. Bill had made them swear, cut all their palms, and he hadn’t wanted to, but he had because he hadn’t known what else to do, and he loved them all, and what else was he going to do? But he didn’t want to come back. He  _ wouldn’t have fucking come back _ . 

_ I knew you wouldn’t,  _ It says suddenly.  _ I knew you wouldn’t, and THEY knew you wouldn’t, we all knew, Stanley, oh yes. Not if you remembered everything.  _

Stan wants to say,  _ You didn’t give me all my memories, you made it so I wouldn’t remember everything so I  _ would  _ come back, _ wants to scream,  _ Fuck you!  _ But he can’t bring himself to acknowledge it, to acknowledge Patty somewhere down the hall, to acknowledge anything but the images running through his head. He’s whispering, whimpering, “It’s not real, it’s not real,” like he really is a kid again, and that was always Richie’s mantra, back in the day, but it’s a good mantra, and he wants it so badly to be true. He thinks he’s rocking back and forth, just a little, in the empty tub. 

_ I KNEW you wouldn’t come back, Stanley, but all the others were gone, and I needed them to come back, I needed all of you. I’ve missed you, Stanley. _

“Shut up,” Stan whispers in a small voice.

_ You know what’s going to happen, Stanley. Oh, I know you know. You know what you have to do.  _

There are flashes behind Stan’s shut eyes: a full bathtub, water going pink. The pain in his scarred hand traveling down, down, down his arm. IT written on the wall in a trembling red ink, like fingerpaint, or like… like…

_ You didn’t want to come back,  _ It says, and It is laughing.  _ You didn’t want to ever see me again, did you, Stanley? _

Stan shakes his head, but he can’t speak, tears trailing down his face. He didn’t want to come back. He doesn’t want to do this, he doesn’t want to do this…

_ But you have to do it,  _ says It sweetly.  _ You know I won’t let you leave! I won’t let you run away. You fight, or you die, and you make sure your little friends keep their promise. You fight, or you die, and you die by me, or you die by… well, I think you know.  _ Its laughing, the same way It laughed when It threatened the children that It never let them have—because Stan can’t think, can’t think, can’t think, but he is suddenly certain that It is the reason they have never gotten pregnant. It laughs and laughs.  _ You die or you try, and you die if you try!  _ It screams.  _ Those are the choices! You just have to pick the right one.  _

“No,” Stan murmurs. He doesn’t want to give this thing anything. Somewhere in the house, he hears Patty call his name. 

_ You fight or you die, Stanley m’boy, there isn’t another option. Your friends will keep their promise, so you don’t have to keep yours, Stanny, because you’re a little crybaby coward, and you’re going to run away. They’ll come back and you won’t; that’s the deal, right? And you know how to make it happen. _

Stan sees it again: the pink bathwater, IT written on the bathroom wall. Fingerpaints. He thinks he is going to throw up. 

_ You know what you have to do,  _ It says. 

His phone is in his pocket. Somewhere in the house, Patty is calling his name, but Stanley can’t hear her, not really. He wipes his face on the knees of his corduroys. 

_ You get up. You call your friends, the little fucking losers.  _ Its voice is so loud, It sounds like it’s in the tub with Stan, words echoing off the bathroom tile. Red light behind his eyes. Yellow lights in the sewers, three of them. Bev said,  _ I saw us in the cistern.  _ He asked what he looked like, and she said,  _ Like now, but taller.  _ Stan hasn’t wondered until now if she was lying. 

_ You call your friends, and you make your choice, Stanny. Try or die.  _ It fucking giggles.  _ And we both know what you’ll choose, Stanley.  _

His phone is in his pocket. He could probably find their numbers. He’s seeing the bathwater and hearing Bill’s voice— _ Swear if It comes back, we will, too.  _ It feels like his palm is bleeding. He thinks someone is running through the house.

_ Do it.  _ Its voice is hard now, commanding.  _ Do it now, Stanley.  _

Stanley’s head is spinning; he lays it against the porcelain of the bathtub. His heart is thudding so hard it feels like his ribs are going to snap. He opens one palm and traces the scar with one shaking finger. 

He can’t do it, he can’t do it, he won’t face the clown again. The night after the first fight, when he couldn’t sleep because he was so scared, even with all the lights on, even plugged into his Walkman, he swore he would never, ever do anything like that again. He doesn’t know what the fuck he was thinking when he swore that. He doesn’t want to die, but he can’t face It again, because he’ll die, then, too. He’s got three options, and they all end in him dead, the way he sees it, because yes, It will never let him leave. He doesn’t want to die, though. He doesn’t  _ want _ to die.

“I would’ve never come back if I’d known,” he whispers to his knees. “I never would’ve come… never would’ve brought Patty here…” His voice breaks on the word  _ Patty _ . He thinks he’s forgotten what she looks like. 

_ You promised,  _ says the clown.  _ You all promised to come back. They have to come home, Stanley.  _

“I don’t wanna do this,” he whimpers.

_ Make your calls and say your prayers and turn out the lights, Stanley. You know this is the only way. They have to come back. And you have to take yourself off the board. _

“I don’t want to do this,” he whispers, and he pictures that phone in his pocket, and it hits him. “I don’t want my friends to die.” 

_ Time’s running out, Stanley. _

Somewhere on the other side of the door, someone begins screaming his name. Begins pounding on the door like she’s trying to break it down. Shouting, “Stanley! Stanley, let me in!”

“Pats,” Stan whispers, and something inside him breaks a little. If he does this—calls his friends and takes himself off the board, doesn’t face It again—then he will die and his friends might die. And Patty… he’ll be leaving her alone here. Leaving her alone in this hell hole, where she will be in danger. He’ll be leaving her to die, too. 

“Stanley, open the fucking door!” Patty shouts. She might be angry or she might be crying. Might be sobbing on the other side of this fucking door. 

The image slides to the surface again—the bathwater—but Stan pushes it away this time. The voice starts up again, whispering in his ears, stern and unyielding.  _ Do it,  _ It whispers.

Stan’s phone is in his hand, and the bathroom cabinet is open. Patty kicks the door, and Stanley can really hear her crying. 

_ Do it, Stanley. Do it. Doitdoitdoitdoitdoitdoit… _

“Get out of my fucking head!” Stanley roars. He flings his phone in one fluid motion, flings it so it hits the bathroom wall with a  _ crunch  _ before falling to the floor. 

Everything stops. The voices, the images, Patty screaming and banging on the door. All of it. Stan’s head clears abruptly, like a fucking fog was lifted off of his brain. That feels like the only way to describe it. 

Stan climbs messily out of the tub and promptly vomits in the toilet, thinking,  _ I’ve gotta tell Richie about this. He’ll never let me live it down _ , because what else can he think, now? And then he goes to the door and unlocks it and flings it open.

Patty’s frozen in place, staring at him with huge eyes. Her knuckles bruising from where she’d been pounding on the door. They’re both crying, tears streaming down their faces, Patty’s breaths coming out shaky and uneven. Stan has so many things he wants to say—apologies he wants to make—but all he can muster up is, “Pats…” before she falls into his arms. 

They wrap themselves around each other, a tangle of limbs and teary kisses, and crumple to the ground, right there in the doorway of the bathroom. Holding on like they’re never letting go, like their life depends on it. 

\---

Stan tells her everything. Right then and there, when they’re wiping tears off of each other’s faces, still wrapped around each other, he tells her all of it, the summer he was thirteen. Shows her his scars. Tells her and apologizes, tells her he never would've brought her here if he'd known, tells her he's sorry and he loves her and he would've told her but he didn't remember until just now. 

She believes him, because that's what they do, and also because she's seen it herself. "I've been hearing voices," she admits. "I thought I was losing my mind. I heard a voice saying that it was time, and you would have to choose, and I would see soon… It came from the drain, and from the sewer grates outside…" Patty shudders, and tightens her grip on him. "And then you fell and went into the bathroom, and I was… trying to figure out if I should follow you, and…" She gulps, tears shining in her eyes. "Stanley, I saw you dead. In the hall mirror. You were bleeding out in the bathtub."

Stan shuts his eyes and presses their foreheads together, shaking with the weight of this huge fucking thing. Drowning in it. “It showed me that, too,” he whispers. “I think… It wanted me to call my friends, and then It wanted me to…” 

“But you didn’t,” Patty says, her voice rough and small all at once.

Stan shakes his head. “I didn’t.” He looks over his shoulder out at the bathroom, at his phone lying cracked and dormant on the tiled floor. He kisses Patty a couple times: her forehead, her nose. She puts her head to his shoulder and murmurs, “So what do we do now?” 

“I don’t know,” says Stanley, his voice breaking. She takes his hands in hers and he looks down at them, at anything but this bathroom and the phone and the tub. “I shouldn’t have made that promise. I should’ve known I wouldn’t be able to keep it. This scares the shit out of me, Pats, worse than anything else, and I…” He shakes his head hard. “I can’t leave,” he says softly. “It will kill me. It told me so.” Patty’s hands tighten on his and he shuts his eyes, swallows back a sob. “And I don’t want to… I don’t want to face it again, but Pats, I… I don’t think I have a choice. I can die or I can fight It. There’s no way out.” 

“Maybe It’s bluffing,” Patty says, touching the side of his face. “Maybe you’re stronger than It, like you were when you were a kid…”

“That was just all of us together,” says Stan. “At least that’s what Bill believed, and I have no reason not to believe it. I can’t do this alone. But I… I don’t want to call them back. I don’t want to call them back just to die, that’s not fair, they… half of us didn’t make it out alive last time and it could happen again. They have lives, families, I can’t…” 

“But you promised to come back,” says Patty, and her voice is stronger now. “All of you. Do you think they won’t keep their promise?”

“No. No, I… I know they  _ will  _ keep it. That’s what scares me.”

“I know,” Patty whispers. She kisses his forehead, crawled halfway into his lap. “Baby, I don’t want… I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you to die, and I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to lose this… but this thing is killing kids.” Stan swallows hard, thinking of the kids from Patty’s school who have already gone missing, and Betty and Ed and Georgie, Adrian Mellon; all of them, once… He nods, and Patty nods, too. “I think if we might can stop it, then we have to take that chance,” she says, voice breaking. “And… I think that includes your friends. If what you’ve told me is true, then I think that’s the only way we stand a fighting chance.”

Stan breathes in slowly, thinking of that warm fall day, of the sting in his palm and the warm blood between their fingers as they linked hands. None of them had really wanted to do it, to chase the clown—the group had almost fallen apart over it. But they'd all offered their hands up to Bill without question. There  _ wasn't  _ any question, not after what happened in the sewers—the disbelief and the denial and the laughing it off as fucking nuts came later. But in the aftermath of what they'd done, it was like they had an understanding. And that was why Stan hadn't protested then, why none of them had protested. They all understood. They all knew what they had to do.

He exhales with a whoosh and says, "Okay. You're right. I'll call them—tonight, I'll call them tonight. And baby, you should… you should get out of here. You should go now, you should leave tonight."

Patty goes a little pale as she says, "What? Stanley, no." But Stan is still talking, vision pigeonholed with the importance of getting her out—it is the most important thing now. "You have to go now, Pats, you can't… you can't stay here, it's too dangerous. You have to go, you can… go see your parents, and I'll come get you when it's done…"

Patty cuts him off abruptly with a gentle hand over his mouth. "I'm not leaving you," she tells him, sterner than she's ever spoken to him before. He tries to protest, but she shakes her head and says, gentler this time, "I am  _ not  _ leaving you, Stanley. I-I can't. How could you expect me to… I thought I was going to  _ lose  _ you tonight, baby, how the hell could you…" She breaks off, wiping her eyes frantically with one hand. 

"I can't lose you," Stan says, his voice breaking. "You have to go, babylove, I can't—it's  _ dangerous  _ here." He's remembering the nightmare, Its words— _ They'll float with you _ —and it's Pats, his friends, the kids he'll never have, and he  _ can't.  _ He won't do it. "If I can't protect anyone else," he says, "at least let me protect you."

Patty shakes her head, clutching hard to his shirt. "Stanley, I can't—" She breaks off and starts over, starts again. "You said It'll kill you if you leave, right?" Stan nods. Patty says then, gently, "What makes you think It wouldn't do the same thing to me if I tried to leave?"

Stan bursts into tears then. He can't help it. He starts crying and he can't stop. Can only cling to Patty like a rock in the storm, a life preserver in the ocean; can only sob and whisper, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," over and over again. Patty just holds on. When he's done, when they're just leaning against the wall of the bathroom again, Patty whispers, "I'm not leaving you," again, and Stan just nods. They'll do this together. It's the way they've done everything else. 

\---

Stan makes the calls directly after that. Well, first he researches on Patty's laptop, sitting at the kitchen table, and then he calls. Patty takes a large knife out of the drawer before coming to sit beside Stan, the knife within reach and her hand on his knee and her head against his shoulder while they read about where his best friends have ended up. 

It's strange to see where they've all ended up, when Stan remembers them mostly as the kids he knew, and doesn't know them now at all. Well, he knows where some of them ended up—Patty likes Bev's line of clothing, and has sent him New York Times articles on Ben when they pop up on her feed, and they've seen some of Richie's comedy and generally prefer the other stuff. And they've read Bill's books. Patty doesn't really like Bill's books—she likes  _ The Black Rapids  _ okay, mostly cause Stan can pick out which parts Bill probably unknowingly plagiarized from their childhood, but she's never been big on horror. Stan likes most of them—likes finding memories that Bill probably thinks he made up, likes reading the prose and almost being able to hear it in Bill's kid voice (the cadence is all right, the tone), likes the connection to his friend. He even likes the stories sometimes. But he doesn't like the moments that get too dark, that feel too familiar—even when he didn't remember the things he was reading, he instinctively knew, and it made him want to shut the book. Like when he cried when the kid died at the end of the werewolf book and had no idea why. It's hard to read, but it's something, and it gives him an idea of who Bill is, like Richie's comedy or Ben's interviews. So he knows where they ended up. Eddie and Mike are a bit more elusive—apparently Eddie's a risk analyst in New York, and Mike runs a library in New Mexico—but it's relieving to find them, see their names on the screen, the little pictures on their work websites and think,  _ Oh, that's where you ended up.  _ It's still them; Stan knows them immediately. 

He's spent a lot of time thinking about them in his years in the town—it's impossible not to, surrounded by memories like this. He walks around town and mostly sees all the shit he used to get into with his friends—and it only got worse when he started thinking about having kids. He was constantly thinking,  _ Oh, I wonder if my kid will ride bikes by the Standpipe, play hide and seek in the Barrens, swim in the quarry, build a clubhouse in the woods.  _ (And constantly correcting himself because his friends had been maniacs and, okay, so had he, and he did  _ not  _ want his kids doing half the shit he'd done.) He wondered all the time about who they were now, especially after some of them started getting famous. He wondered if they were getting married, if they were happy, if they were traveling, if they were having kids. If they still forgot. He spent a lot of time wanting to call them— _ thinking  _ about calling them. Patty tried to talk him into calling them a couple times; she wanted to meet them, too. But Stan hasn't really seen any of them, except for one close call and one actual encounter. When he was twenty-eight, the Toziers had moved out of Derry and Richie had apparently been in town. But Stan had missed them; he had been in Bar Harbor for the weekend with Patty. Mrs. Tozier apologized about a million times and promised to have Richie call him, but the call never came. Of course. So he missed Richie, but he ran into Mike once in Bangor. 

It was when they were thirty-two and visiting his parents for Passover, and staying in Bangor because they agreed it made more sense than driving back and forth. Stan had to make a drugstore run one night, and that was when he ran into Mike, standing in the drink aisle with his hands in his suit pockets. He’d seen him and something just clicked together in his head, in recognition, and he blurted, “Mike Hanlon?” before he could stop to consider whether or not it was a good idea.

Mike turned to face him, something of a wary look on his face, and clearly didn’t recognize him. Replied politely, “I’m sorry, I don’t… do I know you from somewhere?”

Stan’s face was already turning red, and he was a little glad Patty wasn’t here for this, because Mike clearly didn’t remember, and he was pretty sure the only way to  _ get  _ him to remember would be dragging him over the Derry town line. (He’d been in Bangor a couple days, and his brain was already a little foggy.) “Stan Uris,” he said sheepishly. “We used to hang out in Derry.”

Mike’s brow was still furrowed in confusion, but he nodded and smiled a little. “Right, right, Stan. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, my memory of childhood isn’t…”

“Yeah, I… I figured,” Stan said awkwardly, looking at his watch so he wouldn’t have to see the confusion in Mike’s eyes. “My memory kind of goes out, too, sometimes.” He cleared his throat roughly and added jovially, "It's good to see you! How… how have you been?"

"I've been okay," Mike said, his voice soft. "I've been down in Florida lately… I'm here right now for my grandmother's funeral."

"Jesus, Mike, I'm sorry," Stan said, grimacing—he remembered Mike's grandmother, he remembered liking her a lot. "She was a good woman."

"Thank you, she was," said Mike, but there was obvious discomfort on his face. Discomfort at not recognizing Stan—at not knowing who he was. Stan could see it. He asked Stan a few polite questions about how he'd been, and Stan offered a few tidbits on Patty, his fledgling accounting business, Derry gossip, but any chance of reconnecting seemed to fade at that moment. The lack of recognition. The reminder that his friends didn't know who he was. 

They  _ still _ don't know who he is. Stan knows that for certain. They might in a little bit, but right now, they don't. And he'll have to call and remind them, hold them to the promise they made. Call them home to die. He keeps remembering that day in 1989, out under the warm summer sun, their hands joined, looking out at his friends and thinking,  _ I love them all so much.  _ It was corny, but he'd felt that way; he still does. He had shouted at them that they weren't his friends, down in the sewers, but it wasn't true. He'd known it wasn't true. And he thought in that moment that he would've done anything for them. Like they would've done anything for him. 

_ Swear,  _ Bill had said, and they'd swore. And now it's time to make good on it. 

Stan's staring down at the phone—Patty's phone, his is still smashed on the background phone. His hand is still stinging. Patty still has an encouraging hand on his knee, and she squeezes it gently, the two of them slumped together. 

Stanley kisses the top of her head and reaches for the phone. Dials Bill's number, as naturally as any movement in his life—it's a different number, of course, and they're different people, but he's done this a thousand times before. He's thirteen again, standing in his dad's home office and dialing Bill's number to see if he wants to hang out. He can almost hear Richie and Eddie bickering between their demanded encouragements— _ Get Big Bill the fuck over here! _

Bill answers on the other end with an uncertain, "Hello?" Like he's thrown off. Like this isn't his normal phone greeting. Like he—almost  _ knows _ why Stan is calling. 

"Bill?" Stan says gingerly, and takes a deep breath. "It's Stan. Stanley Uris. From Derry." He takes another deep breath, and Pats tips her head against his. He says, "It's time to come home."

\---

He and Patty go to bed after he finishes the calls. Six phone calls, with startling precision and startling results. (Stan is almost positive his call with Richie ended in puking.) But they're all coming. They said they would come, tomorrow. They'll be here tomorrow. There is nothing they can do until then.

So they go to bed, after Patty has lined the doorway and the windows with salt, and locked the bedroom door. Stan knows this won't do anything, but he can't tell her that, so he lets her. They get in bed and lie there for most of the night, just holding each other. Patty sleeps in brief, restless snatches, but Stan can't sleep, so he just lays there. He tries to keep the lights off, because Patty can't sleep with the lights on, but it doesn't work; every shadow is It, every slight sound means death. He keeps thinking he hears sounds from the drains or vents, sees something looming in the corner. He closes his eyes and sees his dad's painting, the messed up woman, the clown shifting in the sewers, his friends cowering in fear. He turns the lamp on, eventually, because he can't stand it, and keeps his eyes on the door and the windows until morning. 

Sometime after four a.m., Patty puts her hand on his cheek, presses her forehead to his and whispers, "We're going to finish this. We're going to finish this, and then we're going to leave. This will all be over soon."

Stan shuts his eyes. "I love you," he whispers back. "I love you so much, Pats." That is all he can say. 

They spend the day getting ready, in a sense. They agreed to talk over dinner—leave time for travel arrangements, to tie up loose ends—so Stan makes a reservation at Jade of the Orient. He spends half the day at the library, digging through old books and files for information on the clown—he remembers Ben doing that stuff when they were kids. Ben's the one who gave them most of the information. He's pretty much doing the exact opposite of what his thirteen-year-old self would've done—he was happy to exchange theories or stories, feel like he wasn't alone in his fear, but he didn't want to acknowledge the possibilities too closely. The idea that it could be real. Now he's facing the issue head on, because he has to. He won't go in empty-handed, if he can help it; he owes his friends more than that. 

Patty comes with Stan, stays at his side all day. Helps him dig through the books and records, gathers information as diligently as she plans her lessons. They argued about it a little this morning, but really only two things became clear from that: Patty won't leave him, not for anything, and Stan doesn't want to leave her alone at the house. Not undefended. Not with the possibility that It will hurt her. Stan doesn't want her involved in this, and he isn't sure she's safe even three feet away from him, but he's glad that she's there. He wants the company, wants the reassurance that she's safe. And after all his memories of that summer, of the fight, of being cornered alone in the sewers… he's happy he isn't doing this part alone. 

Stan doesn't hear from the clown all day. Maybe that's supposed to be relaxing, like the clown has finally given up, but Stan doesn't find it relaxing. It's like a confirmation that It is waiting—It wants all of them together. The worst is yet to come.

But he tries to keep returning to the positive aspect of it all. He is going to see his friends again—he is going to see them, and they'll know who he is. They're all going to be together again for the first time since Bev left. It's jarring, to think of them all being together, these friends that are now strangers—Stan is still trying to piece together the image he has of them as children and the voices he heard on the other end of the phone. They've been such a monumental part of his life, and were up until they all left and forgot—even after Bev left, they never really forgot her. They called her annually for about a year and a half, and even after she forgot (they hadn't known what it was, then, but it's clear now, she was forgetting), they still talked about her all the time. They talked about visiting each other in college like it was inevitable, a guarantee. Stan remembers fully intending to still hang out with Eddie in New York, remembers planning to call him that first week. But he'd forgotten by the time his parents had driven their rattly old station wagon through the Holland Tunnel. It had just happened that way. 

He spends the whole day telling Patty stories about them, nervous little stories between frantic page-turning and shaky hands. Stuff like, "Ben and Mike used to study in the library after school, at that table right over there. They invited me along more than the others, probably because I was the least distracting. They were too nice to actually  _ say  _ that, you know, but I knew anyway." Or, "Ben did a lot of this research when we were kids. I think he was lonely. He had this huge conspiracy theory board of information—Richie called it his serial killer crazy person wall." Or, "Bev and I weren't super close, but she used to come out birdwatching with me sometimes out at the Standpipe when Bill or whoever was busy and she didn't wanna be home. It was nice to sit with someone you didn't have to  _ talk  _ to, you know." "I had my Boy Scout meetings here as a kid. You know, Eddie is the only one who ever even  _ wanted _ to join Boy Scouts with me. Bill said no and Richie called us nerds. Of course, his mom didn't let him join, but still. I snuck him into a meeting once cause Richie dared us." "My mom worked late in the fourth grade, so she couldn't get me after school, so I used to walk over to the playground with Bill and his mom and Georgie. Mrs. Denbrough always made us play with him, which drove Bill  _ nuts,  _ but I didn't mind. I wasn't very good at playing, but it was nice to feel like I had a little brother every now and then." "Georgie's was the first funeral I ever went to. Even though there wasn't a body. Bill was a mess. I said the Kaddish for Georgie before we knew he was dead. I mean, before Bill knew. Everyone else knew, but we wanted to believe he'd be okay." "The first time It was a clown was in Bill's garage. It came out of a projector. It almost ate me and Bev." "It got me alone once in the sewers. It was going to eat me. It got my face in Its mouth and I think it tried to show me the Deadlights. But I didn't see the future like Bev. I don't think I saw anything.

"I thought my friends had all abandoned me. But they didn't. They came for me and they saved me. And then we saved Bill and Bev. Because that's what we did for each other. That's why we swore to come back."

Patty listens, and never has any hint of disbelief or scorn on her face. Never seems to resent his friends, the way he doesn't. She holds his hand. 

Later, on the way to Jade of the Orient, Stan says, "In a fucked up way, Pats, I'm… I'm glad they're coming back. I mean… I hate this, and I would much rather be millions of miles away from here. It's horrible. I never wanted to do this again. But… I've missed them. They're like family to me, and I've really, really missed them. And I want you to meet them."

"I want to meet them, too," Patty says, genuine and warm. She squeezes his hand on the steering wheel. "It's going to be okay, remember? And they remember you now. They're coming back like they promised, and you all will be stronger together." 

And they do all come back. One by one, they slip into the restaurant, looking different and just the same all at once. Bill first, uncertain and confused with realization gradually setting in, and then Mike, offering hugs and apologies, seeming genuinely embarrassed he didn't recognize Stan eight years ago, and then the rest of them—Eddie listing allergies with the precision he had as a kid, and Richie goofing off like he  _ is  _ still a kid, and Ben and Bev caught in a nervous sort of energy with each other—Bev seems out of sorts at first, so different than how Stan remembers her, but then it fades away, and it's like she never left. It's like  _ none _ of them left—it's the Loser's Club of 1989, thrown forward in time. Like nothing ever changed. 

Patty loves them—she tells him this softly midway through the meal. They're all polite to her, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, acting almost embarrassed, until Richie starts ragging on Stan and they're all suddenly normal again. Stan's embarrassed until he isn't, because it's easy to fall straight into the people they used to be twenty-seven years ago. It just feels right. Derry hasn't felt this comfortable in all his years here, not until now. 

The meal goes to shit surprisingly quick, though, first when Stan has to inevitably, regrettably bring up the clown, and then when their fortune cookies explode in a mess of horrifying shit. The others are rattled, as badly as he is; it feels like his chest is rapidly collapsing, and he can't let go of Patty's hand, his knuckles white from clinging to her. They're all shaken, clustered in the parking lot, and Richie and Eddie keep bringing up leaving, and Stan has to sit down on the hood of their car, his head in his hands. Has to say, "We can't leave, It told me It won't let us leave," between trying to breathe. He feels like Eddie in the midst of an asthma attack—or, wait, no, it was never asthma, Eddie told them. So panic. He is panicking. This is a panic attack. 

Patty is still in the doorway of the restaurant, trying to explain, and she meets Stan's eyes with worry. Stan forces a smile and turns to look back at his friends, who are staring at him like they don't know what to do. "We would have left already," he says in a tight voice, "if we could have. I wouldn't have called you back if I didn't have to."

Richie blinks, getting a look on his face like he's remembering. Bev is pacing absently, lighting a cigarette with similarly shaking hands, avoiding his eyes. Mike is sitting beside him on the car, putting his hand on his shoulder. The way he did outside Neibolt, the first time, when Stan started breaking down. "Stan, uh," he says gently, "if you don't mind me asking, why did you stay?"

Stan isn't sure if he wants to laugh or cry. "It didn't let me remember it all right away," he says through gritted teeth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Eyes on Patty at the door. "It only let me remember you guys, a-and my childhood… I didn't remember It until last night. It didn't  _ let  _ me remember last night."

Bev turns to look at him now, cigarette in her hand, eyes wide. Bill says, his voice shaking, "Because I-I-It knew you wouldn't stay if you remembered."

Stan nods. "It wanted you to come back, too," he says. "It told me I wouldn't be able to leave alive, and then It told me to call you all back and… make a decision for myself."

Bev swallows hard. Their eyes are all wide with concern, staring at him; Richie says loudly, in a way that makes Stan sure his nerves are high, "What the fuck does that mean?"

Breathe in, breathe out. Look at Patty. She's too far for them to hear each other but Stan can see her hands are shaking, too. He takes a deep breath and says, "It wanted me to take myself off the board."

They all seem to know what that means. Eddie curses under his breath. Mike's hand tightens on Stan's shoulder. Bev looks away, over her shoulder, and Stan knows. "Bev," he says, "Bev… you saw that, didn't you? In the Deadlights. When we were kids."

Bev exhales slowly and looks back. Stan can see the glint of tears in her eyes. "Yes," she says quietly. 

Stan grits his teeth together roughly. The others all turn to look at Bev—Ben reaches out with one hand like he's going to touch her shoulder, then yanks it nervously away—but Bev is still looking at him. "But it didn't happen that way," she says. 

"No," says Stan, looking at Patty, and back at them. "It didn't."

They're silent out in the parking lot, staring at each other in the chilly Maine evening. Across the parking lot, Patty starts towards them, something like worry on her face. 

Eddie speaks first, his voice tight. "It forced you to bring us back," he says. "You're… saying we don't have a choice."

Eddie is pale, his breath going wheezy; Stan can see it from across the parking lot. Eddie is the one who stood outside the sewers with him, reluctant to follow Bill; Eddie came around to it more quickly, but he'd been scared, too. They used to talk about it sometimes walking home from school: how scared they were, even though they didn't want to let down Bill. 

Stan wants to tell them to stay. Sort of wants to demand that they stay, after all the shit he's been through. But in the moment, he finds that he can't. How can he? He didn't want to bring them back in the first place. And he wouldn't have come, if he hadn't been trapped. "There's always a choice," he says, and he means it. "I-I didn't want to stay. I didn't want to bring you back. I'm not going to tell you to stay now." His voice breaks a little. "I… I don't want to die. I don't want you guys to die. I'm not going to ask you to stay."

Stan thinks for a moment, as Patty comes and sits beside him, slipping her hand in his, that if they leave, they'll leave, too. Get in the car and drive away and hope for the best. That's all they can do. For a moment, he thinks they're going to refuse, and he couldn't even blame them. He holds on to Patty's hand tight. 

But then Bill speaks. Bill, their unspoken leader, the one they always followed. Blindly. That's what they do. He looks Stan in the eye and says, firmly, "W-w-we're not going anywhere, Stan." 

And no one— _ no one _ disagrees. None of them. Looking out at them, the grown versions of his friends, Stan only sees nervous and fearful resolve. Encouragement. Relief. Bev smiles a little at him, a shaky smile, but one that is easy to read. Mike claps his hand on Stan's shoulder again. Patty squeezes his hand. For a wild moment, Stan thinks it might be okay. 

\---

Everyone stays at their house, mostly by accident. There is room—they added onto the house a couple years ago, two bedrooms and an extra bathroom, in the hopes that they would be for children, and then they became guest rooms when kids never came. They end up back at Stan's and Patty's because Mike suggests looking over the research Stan has done, and the others agree to come along—some more halfheartedly than others, but Stan is relieved. He doesn't think he could sleep right now, and he feels safer as part of a group. Safety in numbers, right? Stronger together? Anyways: they do get a couple of hours of sleep, and this is because everyone falls asleep sprawled out all over their living room, or in the guest rooms. That's it.

The next day might be one of the worst of Stan's life—or at least a runner up to fighting the clown when he was fifteen. (He doesn't think he'll ever get over that.) They immediately have to split up and find some kind of tokens for a ritual that Mike found. Stan opts to stay at home with Patty, digs through the boxes in their office and finds a crumpled shower cap at the bottom of his box, underneath a picture of all of them at the playground near his and Bill's house, posing haphazardly on the jungle gym. (He remembers this photo; he pulled his mom over two blocks to take the photo. He'd had to dig through boxes at the house in Bangor to find it.) The shower caps make sense as a token; he bought them for everybody to keep in the clubhouse, to ward off spiders, and they meant a lot to him, that's why he still has his. So he and Patty mostly just wait, curled up in one chair, waiting for the others to come back. Patty does crosswords, and Stan sketches ridiculous things in the margins of the newspaper—it's what they do every Sunday afternoon. Anything for a distraction. He catches up with the others when they get back, talks about everything that has happened in the missing years. Fucking Henry Bowers breaks in at one point, and manages to stab Richie in the face before Mike brains him with a potted plant Patty keeps on the windowsill. The police come and go. They have to track down Bill at Neibolt, because he's trying to go in on his own. 

And then they have to go in. They have to go in and fight the clown. It's unavoidable. They don't have a choice. 

Stan panics for a minute in the car, outside Neibolt. Panics with the door shut and Patty beside him and the others clustered outside the car worriedly. He wants Patty to stay outside. He practically pleads with her to stay outside. She tells him no, gently. She tells him he's crazy if he thinks she's staying. She tells him, "I'm not leaving you, remember?" And he doesn't want to leave her. 

So she comes with them. The seven Losers and his wife descend into hell, into the bowels of the sewers beneath Derry, to fight something from Stan's worst nightmares. All of their worst nightmares. It's maybe the worst thing Stan has ever experienced, and he spends the entire time checking constantly around and beside him to make sure all of them are there. Constantly counting in the back of his mind. 

He'd be lying if he said he remembered everything that happens down there. It all starts to run together, a nightmarish loop of fear and lights and screaming. Bev gets yanked underwater. Richie gets attacked by something in the house. Georgie's ghost taunts them from the shadows. The ritual doesn't work. The clown tries to kill them and tries to kill them and tries to kill them. They get separated in the middle of the cistern, scattering at the wildly swinging claws.

Stan tries to stay with Patty, but they get ripped apart somewhere in the caverns, and Stan falls. Falls into his bathroom, with a filling bathroom and his own dead body and Patty's screams filling the room.  _ You die if you try!  _ It screeches in his ear.  _ You were always meant to die, Stanley, to die all alone! All alone! All alone!  _

The woman with the messed-up face is in there, and she pulls him into a corner and opens her sharp jaws wide, but Stan can't take his eyes off his own dead body. Can't stop hearing his wife's sobs. Can't scream or call out to tell her that he's okay. He's crying and he can't run and he's going to die, and all he can see is his own body, slumped over in the bath;  _ IT  _ written in his handwriting on the wall. And then there's Patty. Patty pulls him out. Patty wakes him up. Patty's there and they fall to the floor of the cave, their arms wrapped around each other, just for a minute. And then they're running again. 

They kill the clown. Richie gets caught in the Deadlights, and Eddie nearly gets killed getting him out, but the only injury from that is Bev, who gets stabbed in the leg trying to shove them out of the way. They all cluster around her, Ben frantic and packing the sweatshirt Patty shrugs off against her bleeding leg, and Richie won't stop shaking, and then Eddie has an epiphany. And they bully the clown to death, packing in from all sides, Bev and Ben shouting furious insults from where Bev is slumped against the wall. It shrivels as they scream, the fury of twenty-seven years building up in Stan's throat. It shrivels and shrinks and Mike pulls out Its heart and they crush it between their hands. 

And even as the cavern begins to crumble around them and they have to scramble to get out, the relief begins to set in, the incredible relief and guarantee and lifting of the weight begins to set in. They're  _ free.  _ It's done. It's dead, and it's finished, and it's over now. They can leave. And Stan thinks he is crying, when they burst out of the house and push their way into the car, lying Bev out in the backseat. He thinks he is crying with joy. 

\---

Days after it's over, they are all still in Derry, incredibly enough. Bev is still recovering from her stab wound, bandaged and stitched up in one of the guest rooms, where Ben has barely left her side. Eddie has spent the past couple days on the phone with his wife, talking through his apparent divorce. Richie has barely left his side, either. (Stan's guess is that this is a result of something he saw in the Deadlights; Richie seemed beyond shaken after the whole ordeal, more so than the rest of them. Or possibly because he wants to drive Eddie nuts pretending to mess with the stitches in his cheek.) 

Bill has spent a lot of time on the phone with  _ his  _ wife, explaining everything that's happened over the best couple days (as best he can). Decompressing. He visits Georgie's grave several times, by himself, and comes back with red eyes, but he seems a little lighter. Lighter than Stan's seen him since they were thirteen. 

Meanwhile, Mike digs through the research Stan has done, making photocopies, ordering books online, rewriting his own notes again and again. He's thinking of writing a book, he says; it was what his father always wanted to do, and he wanted to complete it for him as a kid. He also offers a lot of traveling recommendations to Stan and Patty; he apparently spent a couple years traveling after college, and has a few places in mind he thinks they'd like. 

Stan and Patty pack. Pack up the house they've spent almost their entire marriage in: their office, their bedroom, the boxes of things they bought for the baby they never had. Patty's plants, Patty's paintings, Stan's books. Their photo albums. The mementos Stan has gathered over the years. Patty regretfully sends in her resignation—"Better to do it during the summer," she says—and tends her garden for the last time. Stan sends in his own resignation and doesn't think a thing of it. They pack up their house and it hurts a little, because they do have good memories here. They've built a life here, a good one. But the bad memories piling on—the nightmares, the injuries, the trauma, the missing kids—is enough to want to make them leave and not look back. They always talked about leaving someday, and now is the right time. 

They're still hoping to start a family, too. They've still got the adoption forms, halfway filled out, and there's the smallest possibility of a baby—it might be crazy, but Mike has a theory that It somehow  _ stopped  _ them from having kids all these years, and maybe that will be gone now that Its dead. Stan can honestly say he'd be happy either way. He wants to find somewhere and make it a home, and when the time is right, bring a child into that home. It's what they've wanted for years. 

Patty's happy—they're both so happy. They cry some nights, with grief and fear and anxiety, the weight of all they've seen and what they almost lost, but some nights, they are crying with happiness. Eagerness for the road ahead. They've got their whole future ahead of them, and it can be anything they want. 

(They both hope that the future will include their friends, whatever that entails. It's been established that Bev is leaving with Ben in a few days, and Stan thinks there's a possibility that Eddie will leave with Richie—they've been joking about it a lot, but with a tremor in their voices like they're half serious. He thinks it's a good match. So pieces of the group are staying together, and Mike has been halfway talking like he wants to move, maybe… Stan wants to stay close to his friends, too. He isn't sure how that would work, or where they would go, but he wants to stay in touch. And Patty does, too. "I like them," she tells him one night, while they're drinking tea in bed. "I'm not saying it because I have to, Stanley. I'm serious," she says, and they both fall into giggles for no real reason. And so they agree, wherever they end up, they want to stay in touch with the other Losers. It's everything Stan wanted—that they  _ all  _ wanted—when they left the first time. It has to happen this way.)

The last night they're all together, the night before Bill's flight back to L.A., they all end up out on the porch. The living room is half boxes at this point, and one of the couches got shoved onto the porch, anyway, so it works. They're all on the porch cutting up and drinking beers, retelling stories that are thirty years old or older, laughing so hard their stomachs hurt, when Ben asks, "Hey, Stan, do you know where you guys are gonna go once you leave?"

Stan shrugs. "Pats?" he asks, kissing her absently under the jaw and ignoring Richie's exaggerated disgusted gagging. 

"We're gonna travel for a bit," Patty says. "And past that, we're not sure. We need to find a place, I guess."

"I-if you ever need a place to stay, I've got a guest room," Bill offers from his spot on the stairs. 

"I'll second that," Mike offers. "I mean, it's more of a sofa bed. But you're welcome to it."

"Ditto," Bev says from the couch.

"You're welcome to Shangri La Tozier, Stancakes, although you'll have to fight Eds for the guest bed. He's scrappy," says Richie. Eddie indignantly pokes him in the shoulder, muttering a retort. 

"Maybe we'll take you up on that," Stan says, hiding his smile in Patty's shoulder. He's missed this. He's really missed this. "Anything to get out of Derry, really." Patty seconds this quietly, wrapping an arm around his neck. 

They're quiet for a moment. The only audible thing is the crickets chirping in the background, until Mike speaks. "Stan, if you don't mind me asking…" he says, "why did you stay in Derry? I know you said you didn't remember everything right away… but what motivated the move besides that?"

Stan pushes his glasses onto his head, his eyes on the pine trees at the edge of the yard, swaying in the wind. He thinks back eighteen years to when they first moved in. The way the memories seemed to just spring up in his mind—and how happy he was to get them all back. "I think It was manipulating me, even back then," he says. "Because we all left, and It needed someone to call us all back. And I just happened to be here. So that's why I came. But I stayed… I stayed because of the memories. The good memories. Because I wanted to remember the good times, and I didn't want to lose it all. I… I didn't want to forget all of you."

It is dark on the porch, but Stan can still see the outlines of his friends' faces. They are all looking at him—Bill and Mike on the porch, Ben and Bev on the couch, where Bev's leg is propped up in his lap, and Richie and Eddie on the swing. It's dark, but Stan thinks they are smiling. And it's true, all of it—it's the type of thing they used to say all the time, when they were over earnest kids who could say things like that and mean them wholeheartedly and not be embarrassed. He thinks about the last times they were all together: the day in the field, when they all cut their hands and swore, and then the parking lot of the Town House the next morning. Telling Bev goodbye. They all crammed in to hug her, a huge group hug, and kind of gave their individual goodbyes, and Bev sniffled and pretended she didn't, and shoved her sunglasses up and said, "I'll call you guys, okay?" And Bill had said, "You know you'll always be our friend, r-r-right, Bev? That's not gonna end cause you move away." And in a way, it kind of hadn't. It really hadn't. 

Richie is the one to break the silence. "Jesus Christ, Stan-man, you're really laying on the sugar shit, aren't you? I haven't heard anything that sappy since  _ January embers _ ."

They all laugh at that—Stan can feel Patty's laughter in his bones—even as he and Ben and Bev say (with no real venom), "Fuck you, Trashmouth." And then they're off again, talking and joking overtop each other, and Stan wraps his arms around his wife and listens. 

He's missed them all so much. They're all here together, and even if Bill is leaving tomorrow, and they'll all be gone in a week or two, they won't lose each other again. They've worried about it a little, but Mike doesn't think they are going to forget—and maybe it is displaced optimism, but Stan believes it. They won't lose each other. They're going to stay friends, and they're going to leave, Stan will be gone within a week or two. He's manned the watchtower all these years, even without knowing it; he's kept the lighthouse. But the light is out now. The light is out and it is dark, and it's time for them—all of them; the Loser's Club of 1989, all together—to leave home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stan's piece presented a particular challenge considering that he never wanted to go back to derry in the first place. i decided on a combination of the nightmares that richie has in his piece and a memory lapse to force stan back, and i ultimately decided that stan had to leave and come back because of patty. i have a soft spot for stanpat and i really, really love patty, possibly because she was the first character i fell in love with when reading the book almost three years ago. so i had to include her. considering how little the movies gave patty to do (seriously, even the miniseries gave her more to do), and how little stanpat there is in movie canon, i borrowed more from book canon than i usually do, so a lot of backstory is borrowed from that portion. 
> 
> (side note that i did feel bad about including patty and not audra. since i do like audra. but i figured she and bill wouldn't have a big Avenue to meet if he never left derry. although i did briefly consider a subplot where he and audra met online. i will definitely write about her someday. female it characters deserve better.)
> 
> i borrowed a lot from lighthouse keeper stuff here, too. the scene with mike and stan was inspired by the scene where mike runs into stan in LK. i borrowed some concepts and scenes from other portions of this fic, like where everyone ended up at college and where all the parents ended up. 
> 
> i did not intend for this piece to get so long (it is actually longer than LK, which surprised me), or for this FIC to get so long. everyone kind of got away from me. one thing i do regret is that bill and ben's parts are so short compared to the others--i still had some restraint at that point lol. honestly, i could've written a lot more for any of these scenarios, and i had a lot of fun coming up with different scenarios and such. 
> 
> in tackling these different AUs, i kind of wanted to keep the standards the same, and not really implicate that any of the losers were more capable than the others. that's why i tried to keep the beats similar: only one loser in derry permanently, eddie and stan always live, someone always gets stabbed by henry bowers, ritual of chud is usually involved. (the most i felt ok with diverting was with bev not calling stan, which i only did because of the canonical deadlight visions.) although it did get a tad monotonous going over the same points repeatedly, i did like kind of getting into the various ins and outs of how these characters would tackle situations differently. 
> 
> to kind of bring a close to this AU and series: this all kind of came from my initial desire to do a character study piece on mike, followed by a 2 a.m. epiphany about what if the others had stayed, and even though this got very out of hand, it's been a lot of fun. the series is done for now -- although i wouldn't be opposed to returning eventually, maybe, for different scenarios like what if they all had stayed or what if none of them had stayed -- but i have enjoyed writing it and i appreciate everyone who has been reading! thanks to all of you. 
> 
> hit me up on tumblr @how-I-met-your-mulder. and also! i am trying out the twitter thing to read twitter fic and vent about writing. you can find me there at @graceskuls. i am always eager for new people to discuss this insane story with

**Author's Note:**

> this is meant to resemble bill's plot in lighthouse keeper, where he leaves with his mom in the middle of high school but comes back to keep visiting his friends for the summers. stoker came from an offhand mention of a cat in lighthouse keeper when mike reads the dust jacket bio in bill's book. (i swear, the best part of writing bill is coming up with plots for his novels lol.)
> 
> hit me up on @how-I-met-your-mulder on tumblr


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